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Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World Hardcover – Illustrated, November 28, 2017
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A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This “bigger mind”―human and machine capabilities working together―has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results? Gathering insights from diverse fields, including philosophy, computer science, and biology, Big Mind reveals how collective intelligence can guide corporations, governments, universities, and societies to make the most of human brains and digital technologies.
Geoff Mulgan explores how collective intelligence has to be consciously organized and orchestrated in order to harness its powers. He looks at recent experiments mobilizing millions of people to solve problems, and at groundbreaking technology like Google Maps and Dove satellites. He also considers why organizations full of smart people and machines can make foolish mistakes―from investment banks losing billions to intelligence agencies misjudging geopolitical events―and shows how to avoid them.
Highlighting differences between environments that stimulate intelligence and those that blunt it, Mulgan shows how human and machine intelligence could solve challenges in business, climate change, democracy, and public health. But for that to happen we’ll need radically new professions, institutions, and ways of thinking.
Informed by the latest work on data, web platforms, and artificial intelligence, Big Mind shows how collective intelligence could help us survive and thrive.
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPrinceton University Press
- Publication dateNovember 28, 2017
- Dimensions6 x 1 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100691170797
- ISBN-13978-0691170794
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A fascinating and important book."---James Crabtree, Financial Times
"The trenchant questions and thoughtful discussion in Big Mind . . . will help us to reimagine our institutions and convince us of the urgency of doing so."---Beth Simone Noveck, Nature
"Brilliant. . . . Drawing on such disciplines as social psychology, computer science, and economics, as well as his experiences as a co-founder of the think tank Demos, Mulgan outlines the elements of CI, which has informed collaborations from the Manhattan project and NASA's moon landings to Google Maps and Wikipedia." ― Kirkus Reviews
"A perfect introduction to collective intelligence. . . . The book draws on subjects such as social psychology, computer sciences and economics, as well as the author’s experiences as co-founder of the think tank Demos." ― Arab News
"[Big Mind] charts the emergence of the new field of collective intelligence, which is harnessing human and digital capabilities for collaborative problem-solving on an unprecedented scale. It’s an argument with profound implications for the way we organise science, universities, businesses and governments."---James Wilsden, The Guardian
"[Big Mind] raises many awkward questions about why modern institutions, stacked with clever people and overflowing with useful data, are so often prone to collective intelligence failures, from some of the policy decisions that led up to this year’s Grenfell Tower fire in London to the run-in to the financial crisis a decade ago."---James Crabtree, Financial Times
"Mr Mulgan’s basic thought is that organisations, like individual minds, can contain highly intelligent elements and yet still be pretty stupid as a whole . . . . The trick is to balance the different sources of cleverness in such a way as to get the best out of all of them."---Oliver Moody, The Times
"An engaging and important read." ― Paradigm Explorer
Review
"In Big Mind, Mulgan nails it yet again. How collective intelligence can stay ahead of artificial intelligence is the big question of the day and Mulgan has answers. This is a smart, lucid, and compelling book."―Julia Hobsbawm, author of Fully Connected
"This insightful and broad-ranging book will appeal to business leaders at all levels, from tech giants to start-ups."―Martha Lane Fox, executive chair of Doteveryone
"Mulgan combines distinguished academic expertise with extensive real-world policy experience. In this important, wide-ranging book, he shows how decision making can be hugely improved in our increasingly networked world. To those of us dismayed by how ineffectually democracy now operates, Big Mind offers a dose of optimism and many concrete proposals. It's enlightening―indeed inspiring―and should be read by all citizens, especially those aspiring to improve all levels of governance."―Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and former president of the Royal Society
"Big Mind is a book the world needs. At a time of intense pessimism about our capacity to reimagine society's systems, and amid rising populism, Mulgan offers a balanced and highly sophisticated approach to revamping democracy and our institutions. Rather than providing technocratic solutions, he lays out intelligent ways to more deeply involve individuals. Through smartly designed systems that structure for participation, a better world is possible―Mulgan’s magnificent book shows us how."―Jeremy Heimans, cofounder of Purpose, GetUp!, and Avaaz
"This book presents a novel way of seeing the world that places collective intelligence center stage. It assesses the practice and evidence on how we might achieve more intelligent institutions and systems, by making the most use of emerging technologies, and by applying more systematic methods to amplifying intelligence in everyday tools for shaping and making decisions."―Stefaan G. Verhulst, GovLab, New York University
"Big Mind brims with pragmatic, unexpected insights. Mulgan filters his awe-inspiring breadth of academic knowledge through the lens of decades of practical experience."―Scott Page, University of Michigan
From the Back Cover
"This important work provides a sophisticated analysis of the various human and computational forms of collective intelligence. Mulgan demonstrates in a powerful way how such collective intelligence can be mobilized to deal effectively and wisely with the most urgent problems on the planet."--Howard Gardner, author of Multiple Intelligences
"In Big Mind, Mulgan nails it yet again. How collective intelligence can stay ahead of artificial intelligence is the big question of the day and Mulgan has answers. This is a smart, lucid, and compelling book."--Julia Hobsbawm, author of Fully Connected
"This insightful and broad-ranging book will appeal to business leaders at all levels, from tech giants to start-ups."--Martha Lane Fox, executive chair of Doteveryone
"Mulgan combines distinguished academic expertise with extensive real-world policy experience. In this important, wide-ranging book, he shows how decision making can be hugely improved in our increasingly networked world. To those of us dismayed by how ineffectually democracy now operates, Big Mind offers a dose of optimism and many concrete proposals. It's enlightening--indeed inspiring--and should be read by all citizens, especially those aspiring to improve all levels of governance."--Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and former president of the Royal Society
"Big Mind is a book the world needs. At a time of intense pessimism about our capacity to reimagine society's systems, and amid rising populism, Mulgan offers a balanced and highly sophisticated approach to revamping democracy and our institutions. Rather than providing technocratic solutions, he lays out intelligent ways to more deeply involve individuals. Through smartly designed systems that structure for participation, a better world is possible--Mulgan’s magnificent book shows us how."--Jeremy Heimans, cofounder of Purpose, GetUp!, and Avaaz
"This book presents a novel way of seeing the world that places collective intelligence center stage. It assesses the practice and evidence on how we might achieve more intelligent institutions and systems, by making the most use of emerging technologies, and by applying more systematic methods to amplifying intelligence in everyday tools for shaping and making decisions."--Stefaan G. Verhulst, GovLab, New York University
"Big Mind brims with pragmatic, unexpected insights. Mulgan filters his awe-inspiring breadth of academic knowledge through the lens of decades of practical experience."--Scott Page, University of Michigan
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Big Mind
How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World
By Geoff MulganPRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2018 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-17079-4
Contents
Preface, vii,Introduction Collective Intelligence as a Grand Challenge, 1,
Part I What Is Collective Intelligence?, 9,
1 The Paradox of a Smart World, 11,
2 The Nature of Collective Intelligence in Theory and Practice, 14,
Part II Making Sense of Collective Intelligence as Choice, 33,
3 The Functional Elements of Collective Intelligence, 35,
4 The Infrastructures That Support Collective Intelligence, 48,
5 The Organizing Principles of Collective Intelligence, 60,
6 Learning Loops, 70,
7 Cognitive Economics and Triggered Hierarchies, 76,
8 The Autonomy of Intelligence, 90,
9 The Collective in Collective Intelligence, 99,
10 Self-Suspicion and Fighting the Enemies of Collective Intelligence, 119,
Part III Collective Intelligence in Everyday Life, 129,
11 Mind-Enhancing Meetings and Environments, 131,
12 Problem Solving: How Cities and Governments Think, 145,
13 Visible and Invisible Hands: Economies and Firms as Collective Intelligence, 161,
14 The University as Collective Intelligence, 174,
15 Democratic Assembly, 181,
16 How Does a Society Think and Create as a System?, 193,
17 The Rise of Knowledge Commons: It's for Everyone, 200,
Part IV Collective Intelligence as Expanded Possibility, 215,
18 Collective Wisdom and Progress in Consciousness, 217,
Afterword: The Past and Future of Collective Intelligence as a Discipline, 229,
Summary of the Argument, 237,
Notes, 239,
Index, 263,
CHAPTER 1
The Paradox of a Smart World
We live surrounded by new ways of thinking, understanding, and measuring that simultaneously point to a new step in human evolution and an evolution beyond humans.
Some of the new ways of thinking involve data — mapping, matching, and searching for patterns far beyond the capacity of the human eye or ear. Some involve analysis — supercomputers able to model the weather, play chess, or diagnose diseases (for example, using the technologies of firms like Google's DeepMind or IBM's Watson). Some pull us ever further into what the novelist William Gibson described as the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace.
These all show promise. But there is a striking imbalance between the smartness of the tools we have around us and the more limited smartness of the results. The Internet, World Wide Web, and Internet of things are major steps forward in the orchestration of information and knowledge.
Yet it doesn't often feel as if the world is all that clever. Technologies can dumb down as well as smarten up. Many institutions and systems act much more stupidly than the people within them, including many that have access to the most sophisticated technologies. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of "guided missiles but misguided men," and institutions packed with individual intelligence can often display collective stupidity or the distorted worldview of "idiots savants" in machine form. New technologies bring with them new catastrophes partly because they so frequently outstrip our wisdom (no one has found a way to create code without also creating bugs, and as the French philosopher Paul Virilio put it, the aircraft inevitably produces the air disaster).
In the 1980s, the economist Robert Solow commented, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." Today we might say again that data and intelligence are everywhere — except in the productivity statistics, and in many of the things that matter most. The financial crash of the late 2000s was a particularly striking example. Financial institutions that had spent vast sums on information technologies failed to understand what was happening to them, or understood the data but not what lay behind the data, and so brought the world to the brink of economic disaster. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet government had at its disposal brilliant minds and computers, but couldn't think its way out of stagnation. During the same period, the US military had more computing power at its disposition than any other organization in history, but failed to understand the true dynamics of the war it was fighting in Vietnam. A generation later the same happened in Iraq, when a war was fought based on a profound error of intelligence launched by the US and UK governments with more invested than any other countries in the most advanced intelligence tools imaginable. Many other examples confirm that having smart tools does not automatically lead to more intelligent results.
Health is perhaps the most striking example of the paradoxical combination of smart elements and often-stupid results. We now benefit from vastly more access to information on diseases, diagnoses, and treatments on the Internet. There are global databases of which treatments work; detailed guidance for doctors on symptoms, diagnoses, and prescriptions; and colossal funds devoted to pushing the frontiers of cancer, surgery, or pharmaceuticals.
But this is far from a golden age of healthy activity or intelligence about health. The information available through networks is frequently misleading (according to some research, more so than face-to-face advice). There are well over 150,000 health apps, yet only a tiny fraction can point to any evidence that they improve their users' health. The dominant media propagate half-truths and sometimes even lies as well as useful truths. And millions of people make choices every day that clearly threaten their own health. The world's health systems are in many ways pioneers of collective intelligence, as I will show later, but much doesn't work well. It's estimated that some 30 to 50 percent of antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary, 25 percent of medicines in circulation are counterfeit, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of diagnoses are incorrect, and each year 250,000 die in the United States alone because of medical error (the third leading cause of death there). In short, the world has made great strides in improving health and has accumulated an extraordinary amount of knowledge about it, yet still has a long way to go in orchestrating that knowledge to best effect.
Similar patterns can be found in many fields, from politics and business to personal life: unprecedented access to data, information, and opinions, but less obvious progress in using this information to guide better decisions. We benefit from a cornucopia of goods unimaginable to past generations, yet still too often spend money we haven't earned to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like.
We have extraordinary intelligence in pockets, for specific, defined tasks. Yet there has been glacial, if any, progress in handling more complex, interconnected problems, and paradoxically the excitement surrounding new capacities to sense, process, or analyze may distract attention from the more fundamental challenges.
In later chapters, I address what true collective intelligence would look like in some of the most important fields. How could democracy be organized differently if it wanted to make the most of the ideas, expertise, and needs of citizens? Various experiments around the world suggest what the answers might be, but they baffle most of the professionals brought up in traditional politics. How could universities become better at creating, orchestrating, and sharing knowledge of all kinds? There are seeds of different approaches to be found, but also extraordinary inertia in the traditional models of three-year degrees, faculty hierarchies, lecture halls, and course notes. Or again, how could a city administration, or national government, think more successfully about solving problems like traffic congestion, housing shortages, or crime, amplifying the capabilities of its people rather than dumbing them down?
We can sketch plausible and achievable options that would greatly improve these institutions. In every case, however, the current reality falls far short of what's possible, and sometimes tools that could amplify intelligence turn out to have the opposite effect. Marcel Proust wrote that "nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect." The same may be true of collective intelligence.
CHAPTER 2The Nature of Collective Intelligence in Theory and Practice
The word intelligence has a complex history. In medieval times, the intellect was understood as an aspect of our souls, with each individual intellect linked into the divine intellect of the cosmos and God. Since then, understandings of intelligence have reflected the dominant technologies of the era. René Descartes used hydraulics as a metaphor for the brain and believed that animating fluids connected the brain to limbs. Sigmund Freud in the age of steam power saw the mind in terms of pressure and release. The age of radio and electrics gave us the metaphors of "crossed wires" and being "on the same wavelength," while in the age of computers the metaphors turned to processing and algorithmic thinking, and the brain as computer.
There are many definitions of intelligence. But the roots of the word point in a direction that is rather different from these metaphors. Intelligence derives from the Latin word inter, meaning "between," combined with the word legere, meaning "choose." This makes intelligence not just a matter of extraordinary memory or processing speeds. Instead it refers to our ability to use our brains to know which path to take, who to trust, and what to do or not do. It comes close in this sense to what we mean by freedom. The phrase collective intelligence links this with a related idea. The word collective derives from colligere. This joins col, "together," and once again, legere, "choose." The collective is who we choose to be with, who we trust to share our lives with. So collective intelligence is in two senses a concept about choice: who we choose to be with and how we choose to act.
The phrase has been used in recent years primarily to refer to groups that combine together online. But it should more logically be used to describe any kind of large-scale intelligence that involves collectives choosing to be, think, and act together. That makes it an ethical as well as technical term, which also ties into our sense of conscience — a term that is now usually understood as individual, but is rooted in the combination of con (with) and scire (to know).
Possibility
We choose in a landscape of possibilities and probabilities. In every aspect of our lives we look out into a future of possible events, which we can guess or estimate, though never know for certain. Many of the tools I describe through the course of this book help us make sense of what lies ahead, predicting, adapting, and responding. We observe, analyze, model, remember, and try to learn. Although mistakes are unavoidable, repeated mistakes are unnecessary. But we also learn that in every situation, there are possibilities far beyond what data or knowledge can tell us — possibilities that thanks to imaginative intelligence, we can sometimes glimpse.
Groups
One of the first historical accounts of collective intelligence is Thucydides's description of how an army went about planning the assault on a besieged town. "They first made ladders equal in length to the height of the enemy's wall, which they calculated by the help of the layers of bricks on the side facing the town, at a place where the wall had accidentally not been plastered. A great many counted at once, and, although some might make mistakes, the calculation would be more often right than wrong; for they repeated the process again and again, and, the distance not being great, they could see the wall distinctly enough for their purpose. In this manner they ascertained the proper length of the ladders, taking as a measure the thickness of the bricks."
Understanding how we work together — the collective part of collective intelligence — has been a central concern of social science for several centuries. Some mechanisms allow individual choices to be aggregated in a socially useful way without requiring any conscious collaboration or shared identity. This is the logic of the invisible hand of the market and some of the recent experiments with digital collective intelligence like Wikipedia. In other cases (such as communes, friends on vacation, or work teams), there is the conscious mutual coordination of people with relatively equal power, which usually involves a lot of conversation and negotiation. Loosely networked organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous are similar in nature. In others (for instance, big corporations like Google or Samsung, ancient Greek armies, or modern global NGOs), hierarchy organizes cooperation, with a division of labor between different tiers of decision making.
Each of these produces particular kinds of collective intelligence. Each feels radically different, and works well for some tasks and not others. In some cases there is a central blueprint, command center, or plan — someone who can see how the pieces fit together and may end up as a new building, a business plan, or initiative. In other cases the intelligence is wholly distributed and no one can see the big picture in advance. But in most cases the individual doesn't need to know much about the system they're part of: they can be competent without comprehension.
The detailed study of how groups work shows that we're bound together not just by interests and habit but also by meanings and stories. But the very properties that help a group cohere can also impede intelligence. These include shared assumptions that don't hold true, a shared willingness to ignore uncomfortable facts, groupthink, group feel, and mutual affirmation rather than criticism. Shared thought includes not only knowledge but also delusions, illusions, fantasies, the hunger for confirmation of what we already believe, and the distorting pull of power that bends facts and frames to serve itself. The Central Intelligence Agency informing President George H. W. Bush that the Berlin Wall wouldn't fall, just as the news was showing it doing just that; investment banks in the late 2000s piling into subprime mortgages when all the indicators showed that they were worthless; Joseph Stalin and his team ignoring the nearly ninety separate, credible intelligence warnings that Germany was about to invade in 1941 — all are examples of how easily organizations can be trapped by their frames of thinking.
We succumb all too readily to illusions of control and optimism bias, and when in a crowd can suspend our sense of moral responsibility or choose riskier options we would never go for alone. And we like to have our judgments confirmed, behaving all too often like the Texas sharpshooter who sprays the walls with bullets and then draws the target around where they hit. These are just a few reasons why collective intelligence is so frequently more like collective stupidity.
They show why most groups face a trade-off between how collective they are and how intelligently they can behave. The more they bond, the less they see the world as it really is. Yet the most successful organizations and teams learn how to combine the two — with sufficient suspension of ego and sufficient trust to combine rigorous honesty with mutual commitment.
General and Specific
How we think can then be imagined as running in a continuum from general, abstract intelligence to intelligence that is relevant to specific places, people, and times. At one extreme there are the general laws of physics or the somewhat less general laws of biology. There are abstracted data, standardized algorithms, and mass-produced products. Much of modernity has been built on an explosion of this kind of context-free intelligence. At the other end of the spectrum there is rooted intelligence — intelligence that understands the nuances of particular people, cultures, histories, or meanings, and loses salience when it's removed from them.
The first kinds of intelligence — abstract, standardized, and even universal — are well suited to computers, global markets, and forms of collective intelligence that are more about aggregation than integration. By contrast, the ones at the other extreme — like knowing how to change someone's life or regenerate a town — entangle multiple dimensions, and require much more conscious iteration and integration along with sensitivity to context.
Collective Intelligence and Conflict
The simplest way to judge individual intelligence is by how well it achieves goals and generates new ones. But this is bound to be more complex for any large group, which is likely to have many different goals and often-conflicting interests.
This is obviously true in the economy, since information is usually hoarded and traded rather than shared. Societies try to design arrangements (including patents and copyrights) that reward people for both creating and sharing useful information, though, as I will show in chapter 17, the rise of economies based on information and knowledge has shifted the balance between private ownership and the commons, and led to an evident underproduction of informational commons. Even if this problem were fixed, though, there would still be unavoidable tensions thanks to conflicting interests.
Many collective actions that appear stupid may be intelligent for some of the people involved, such as a country setting out on a war it is unlikely to win (to shore up support for an insecure dictator), a bank taking apparently mad risks (which offer huge personal gains to a few at the top), or a religious community holding on to beliefs in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence (as the price for holding the community together).
Many traditions of social science have grappled with these issues: How can the principal (for instance, the public) ensure that their agent (say, government) really does act in their interests?
Seeing these issues through the lens of collective intelligence opens up the possibility that shared observation, reasoning, memory, and judgment will all increase the pressure to find mutually advantageous solutions. Think, for example, of a country coming out of civil war and strife. The ones that have done well intensify what we will see later as the hallmarks of successful collective intelligence: bringing facts and feelings to the surface in ways that are detached from interests; jointly deliberating about what is to be done and opening up alternative scenarios; discussing openly who is to be punished and who deserves restitution; and addressing memory openly through truth and reconciliation commissions.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Big Mind by Geoff Mulgan. Copyright © 2018 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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- Publisher : Princeton University Press; Illustrated edition (November 28, 2017)
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- ISBN-10 : 0691170797
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It was a similar case for core topics like infrastructure, learning loops, and organizing principles. Highly generalized definitions and examples that offer no novel insights. The most valuable part of the book are the notes to the sources. I hope to find some of these more directly useful.
I think the reason I like Geoff Mulgan’s books is that ideas come at you like buckshot. Packets of multiple ideas fire again and again with every chapter, page and paragraph. If you’ve learned nothing from a Geoff Mulgan exercise, you must have slept through it. In Big Mind:
-Computers can generate answers much more easily than they can generate questions, the mark of real intelligence.
-Greater knowledge does not bring greater comfort. It brings awareness, anxiety, caution and worry. It gives us vast new things to worry about.
-All our gadgets do not make our lives simpler; they add complexity.
-The vast majority of meetings in business, academia and politics ignore almost everything that is known about what make meetings work.
-There’s a temptation to make too much use of data that happens to exist, and manage what’s measured rather than what matters.
-We spend our lives looking for confirmation rather than responding to intelligence.
-We risk not having internalized the lesson if we haven’t experienced the errors.
-There are levels of abstraction as organizations move to more diverse ways of looking at their situations. Those that can’t, stay stuck in the primordial reactions to events. (eg. airline security, which continually punishes passengers further every time there is a threat, instead of thinking how to make flying safer.)
-Universities do research and development on everything except themselves. (Universities should be actively collecting knowledge as much as disseminating it.)
-Cultures that think of themselves as individualistic, dissident and rebellious tend to be highly conformist.
-The biggest danger in any field is the delusion you understand why you succeeded.
-intelligence is highly improbable, and collective intelligence is even more so.
All of this pivots about the point Mulgan calls the third loop of learning. The first loop is what we all do – observe, and apply rules we know. The second loop makes use of knowledge to come to new and innovative conclusions. The third loop is when whole sectors and industries change in light of anticipated developments and ways of thinking and doing. Doing this at world scale is Mulgan’s idea of collective intelligence. It means combining with data and artificial intelligence, because people alone and computers alone can accomplish far less.
What emerges is that although he has been thinking along the lines of a collective intelligence for many years, Mulgan is not prepared to predict or envision it. There are too many variables, too many unknowns, and too many rogue components for anyone to pretend they can nail it down. We are held back because our institutions aren’t open in their thinking, and we are stymied by competition rather than co-operation. He would like collective intelligence to coalesce into a discipline.
David Wineberg
Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2017
I think the reason I like Geoff Mulgan’s books is that ideas come at you like buckshot. Packets of multiple ideas fire again and again with every chapter, page and paragraph. If you’ve learned nothing from a Geoff Mulgan exercise, you must have slept through it. In Big Mind:
-Computers can generate answers much more easily than they can generate questions, the mark of real intelligence.
-Greater knowledge does not bring greater comfort. It brings awareness, anxiety, caution and worry. It gives us vast new things to worry about.
-All our gadgets do not make our lives simpler; they add complexity.
-The vast majority of meetings in business, academia and politics ignore almost everything that is known about what make meetings work.
-There’s a temptation to make too much use of data that happens to exist, and manage what’s measured rather than what matters.
-We spend our lives looking for confirmation rather than responding to intelligence.
-We risk not having internalized the lesson if we haven’t experienced the errors.
-There are levels of abstraction as organizations move to more diverse ways of looking at their situations. Those that can’t, stay stuck in the primordial reactions to events. (eg. airline security, which continually punishes passengers further every time there is a threat, instead of thinking how to make flying safer.)
-Universities do research and development on everything except themselves. (Universities should be actively collecting knowledge as much as disseminating it.)
-Cultures that think of themselves as individualistic, dissident and rebellious tend to be highly conformist.
-The biggest danger in any field is the delusion you understand why you succeeded.
-intelligence is highly improbable, and collective intelligence is even more so.
All of this pivots about the point Mulgan calls the third loop of learning. The first loop is what we all do – observe, and apply rules we know. The second loop makes use of knowledge to come to new and innovative conclusions. The third loop is when whole sectors and industries change in light of anticipated developments and ways of thinking and doing. Doing this at world scale is Mulgan’s idea of collective intelligence. It means combining with data and artificial intelligence, because people alone and computers alone can accomplish far less.
What emerges is that although he has been thinking along the lines of a collective intelligence for many years, Mulgan is not prepared to predict or envision it. There are too many variables, too many unknowns, and too many rogue components for anyone to pretend they can nail it down. We are held back because our institutions aren’t open in their thinking, and we are stymied by competition rather than co-operation. He would like collective intelligence to coalesce into a discipline.
David Wineberg
Enter this book, providing a credible and accessible look at the field of collective intelligence, considering how human and machine-minds can be harnessed to solve the big problems of the future. It is not, however, just a case of throwing resources at the problems. So-called smart technologies may be smart, in a limited scale, but they are not miracle workers. A multidisciplinary, multi-format approach is needed, and even then nothing is guaranteed. A room full of smart people does not necessarily mean that only smart decisions will emerge either: often the inverse happens!
Yet developments are happening at a seemingly breakneck speed. Even in my soon half-decade on this earth, things I couldn’t imagine as a child as being reality are existing today. It is not so long ago that even getting live video, on a postage stamp-sized computer window, connected by modem was seen as amazing. Now we may complain when our high-definition or 4K video buffers or has an artefact, streamed from a 4G mobile phone when sitting in our garden. The ability to process massive amounts of data for good (and at times less-good) things is amazing too. All this is here today, but oh-so-much-more is waiting for the future and the real smart stuff may come with the next-generation of business, education and human thinking, aided by the technology developed at the same time.
Getting there, however… So, this is a timely, enjoyable book. It gave a lot for both specialist and generalist alike. It was written to service both audiences and can really draw you in. The author has credibly analysed the status quo today and sought to consider how this evolution may continue to leverage tomorrow’s benefits, with collective collaborative intelligence at its core.
Consider this to be more of an essay about the scope and potential of the collective mind. It is not a typical textbook, although it can certainly be used to sustain and extend debate. Mankind has a great potential ahead of it, but also it has displayed the ability time after time to pursue evil rather than good. Inevitably some of the ‘big mind’ developments will be used in a negative way, but hopefully positive developments will prevail. Of course, if the nirvana or threat of machines thinking for themselves and operating truly independently takes place – a machine with a brain and conscience – there is a risk that the fight between good and evil will then take place at the system level… the stuff science-fiction can be made of.
This book is not a whacky science-fiction dreaming book. It has its collective insight firmly anchored to the ground, provoking thought and interest into a subject that has a lot of yet-to-be-realised potential. It is highly recommended and very more-ish!




