Collective intelligence

Groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent. Malone’s definition, and the standing one in the field.

Seem is load-bearing. The judgment is made from outside, on what the group does, with no claim about what happens inside it. Individuals does not mean people either: the property can arise in a group of people and computers, in computers alone, in ants or bacteria. It belongs to the group, not to the species of its members.

Woolley and colleagues found one statistical factor predicting how a group of people performs across very different tasks. Three things correlate with it, and the members' expertise is not among them. Average social perceptiveness, even distribution of conversational turns, and the proportion of women, where the third is explained statistically by the first.

Malone’s definition judges a group you already have, at a task it is already doing. It says nothing about what else that group could handle. Kaznowski, writing in 2012, set that condition instead: collective intelligence is an intelligent system able to solve an undefined but arbitrarily wide range of problems.