Collective Intelligence
By Peter LloydAs a group, ants appear to be way ahead of humans in crowdsourcing, social networking, and just plain getting stuff done. Before we showed up and began trampling their colony entrances, they could enlist the brain power of their colonies to rebuild them.
Decision making by collaboration and consensus has worked for the animal world forever. Watch how this small group of ants moves a complex structure without a requisition, work order, or supervisors.
If we gave a group of humans a proportionally difficult challenge and raced them against this group of ants, who would win? Since there’s no way to tell the ants they’re in a race, we’d have to keep the humans in the dark as well. Now who would you bet on?
Bacteria and other animals do what we humans still struggle to do with our democracies, caucuses, committees, and lately, our computer networks. We’ve fumbled around with the concept of collective intelligence for a long time, calling it things like group mind, global brain or world brain, and the noosphere. So what’s taking us so long to get it right?
I think we may have to take another look at intellectual property. We use it to reward innovation. But when we make human creativity the property of the creator, we restrict greater collaboration. We limit cross pollination.
Products like Linux, developed by and continuously improved by anyone willing and able to do so as long as they keep their work open and available, demonstrate that we’re on the right track. We need more and we will continue to create more with open collaboration. See Open Innovation Success Stories.
To be fair, ants don’t do anything new or original. At least I haven’t seen Ant Art or heard a Symphony in B Major. That kind of creativity seems to be reserved for us and maybe other primates. But we could get a lot of drudge work done if we could collaborate as well as insects. And with the power of new media, we have the opportunity to apply our collective intelligence and creativity to innovation and invention.
Read The Global Brain: The Awakening Earth in a New Century
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.