A-00-03 Editor's Preface

Editor's Preface

Mark Tovey

This book is not about collective intelligence as an abstraction, but collective intelligence directed towards a specific end. It attempts to get some traction on difficulties that seem almost impossible to address-dealing with poverty and hunger, corruption and terrorism, climate change and resource shortages-while at the same time building a more livable and less violent world.

The problems that face humanity are trans-institutional. They are not problems that can be solved by governments alone. Only through coordinated cooperation between governments, universities, corporations, and NGOs, can we hope to make a dent in the acute challenges that face us (I-01-02).

This involves bridging diverse viewpoints. When we are dealing with as many points of view as are expressed in such institutions, facilitated discussions can be very helpful. There are specific principles that can help diverse groups of people engage in dialogue with each other in a way that is unencumbered by ego (I-02-01). Indeed, it seems important to have groups that are as diverse as possible, groups where tensions are inevitably going to arise, and where they can be safely examined and understood (I-02-03). Anyone who has spent time observing (or participating in) a flame war on an Internet news group knows that these kinds of principles are just as urgently needed in the electronic sphere. As we attempt to scale up our deliberative discussions through electronic communities (I-04-02), argumentation systems (II-08-03), and social networking (I-04-01), a deep understanding of these principles, and how they can be applied in a variety of domains, will be needed.

To do this, we must ask questions that matter (I-02-02). Questions serve at least two purposes: channeling and encouraging fruitful dialogue (I-02-03), and leading to further inquiry and knowledge generation (I-02-04). Whatever we learn about how to ask the right questions will have great applicability across the board, whether in designing appropriate technology (II-06-03), doing foresight (I-01-01), or writing group blogs (I-08-03). There are projects now underway to articulate the principles of successful civic interaction (I-03-01).

How can we invite ordinary citizens into the decision-making process in a way that is likely to produce generally accepted results (I-02-05)? Virtual models of a city could significantly engage citizens by allowing them to visualize and plan a better future more easily (I-03-05). How can we winnow suggestions from citizens in a way that will be perceived as fair (II-08-02)? How can we give people the information they need to make critical decisions, when much of it is closed off in information silos (Publisher's Preface, I-03-03)?

If it is important to have not just a few individuals, but all members of a society, capable of thinking carefully about the challenges we face, how do we enable everyone to do so (I-03-04)? Are there ways that we can invite people to think more globally, to take not just their communities, but the whole of humanity, the whole biosphere, into consideration (I-03-02)?

As more and more of the world is enabled to connect, we need tools to analyze how we are connecting (I-04-01) so that we can design electronic communities that encourage thought and substantive discussion (I-04-02), where expertise is readily shared (I-04-03). We need an Internet where individuals will have greater control over how their information is used by companies (I-05-01), which may encourage them to be more open with their information (I-05-02).

How do we think clearly about problem solving (I-06-01)? How do we improve our facility with producing collective intelligence (A, B, I-06-03)? How do we re-think hierarchy (I-06-02) in an increasingly peer-produced world (II-07-02)?

These are not easy questions, but we can draw inspiration from nature (biomimicry) (II-01-02), to help design better collectively intelligent systems. If we learn more about how locusts or starlings swarm, we will gain insight into effective systems of collective online production (II-01-01). Our understanding grows when we begin not only to observe cognition in the wild1, but to model it (II-01-03, II-02-01), and to understand more properly the strengths and limitations of the “Wisdom of Crowds,”2 and the role played by cognitive bias (II-02-02).

To avoid information-overload, we need to invent systems to structure our information semantically (II-03-01, C), and to roll these systems out onto the Internet (II-03-02). These are the foundations for a sophisticated system of information creation, retrieval (II-04-03), and interaction that one might call a global brain (II-03-03, II-05-01) or World Brain (II-05-01, Earth Intelligence Network).3

Whether the development of such a system would lead to a society of richly interconnected individuals (II-04-01), collaborating effectively in high-performance teams (II-04-02), or whether they would result in a society which suppresses individualism (II-02-03), is a question that deserves more than passing attention.

One of the things that can help us maintain our individuality is a powerful set of technologies encouraging communities to design (II-06-03), tinker with (II-06-01), and manufacture (II-06-02), their own stuff: to create their own electrical grids with locally generated electricity (II-07-02), maintain their own broadcast and mesh networks (II-07-03), and produce robust local currencies that can work seamlessly with the global economy (II-05-02). Such activities are also precisely the kinds of de-coupling measures we need to create societies that are resilient against system shocks4 in an increasingly uncertain world.

We are seeing the development of tools that will enable us to move towards a world that is more fiscally (II-05-01, II-08-02) and environmentally (II-05-03, II-05-04) sound. Indeed, open-source and mass collaborative methodologies (II-08-02) are enabling social entrepreneurs of every stripe (II-08-01) to band together and solve the tough problems the world faces (II-08-04). At a local level, community wireless gets people out into cafés, enabling them to meet their neighbors (II-07-01); the more they know about their neighborhood, the more likely they are to feel a sense of connectedness and responsibility towards the community they are living in. With luck, these methodologies will help to lay the foundations for effective, transparent, and participatory democracies of the future (Afterword).

However, we are not there yet. Foresight (I-01-01) and scenario planning (II-08-02) can help us see both opportunities and pitfalls in the adoption of new technologies. Looking back from a possible future (I-03-06) is a useful way of imagining not utopian worlds, or dystopian nightmares, but topias5: imperfect, but livable, visions of the future-realistic futures we might actually want to live in.

All of these forms of openness can be seen to support and facilitate each other, can be seen as elements of an emerging culture, one that values safe, open, and local participation. It is a culture that invites people to be where they are, and gives them inviting spaces in which to do that. Suffixing “2.0” to institutions, whether the Web, the University, or Democracy, speaks to a culture of engagement, contribution, transparency, and creativity, where reuse of both information and physical objects are part of the culture. Gender, class, background, or ethnicity matter less than what someone contributes. In fact this diversity acts not to divide, but to enrich. These are the kinds of values that will be required for successful trans-institutional cooperation and engagement, which is necessary to deal with the challenges that face us as a species, and to create a more peaceful and prosperous world for everyone.

1 Refers to Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

2 Refers to Surowiecki, J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. New York: Doubleday.

3 After H.G. Wells (1938) World Brain. Admantine Press, reprinted in 1993.

4 See Homer-Dixon, Thomas. (2004). Speech to the Navigating a New World Symposium, Convocation Hall, University of Toronto, November 6, 2004. Some of this speech is available at http://www.homerdixon.com/download/thomashomerdixon2-high.mpeg.

5 http://www.topiaenergy.com/ourname.asp

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