You may have heard about ‘big data’, the buzzword de jour that promises a lot of benefits, but perhaps not so much the phrase ‘big mind’. The concept of using collective intelligence to think at scale shouldn’t be so unclear. What it means and how it is utilised, however, can be something else.

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!




Big Mind, written by Geoff Mulgan and published by Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691170794. YYYYY

Aggregation without Integration is not enough

We are, as ever, at a cross roads. We have the choice to combine forces for the greater good, or leave all the potential just sitting there, and proceed as usual, learning the hard way. We can pool our data, expertise and ideas to resolve climate change issues, or argue about whether they should even be considered. It’s back to Carl Sagan’s point – who speaks for Earth or even just earthlings? If we could get our acts aligned, we could make much deeper progress much faster. But our competitive society prevents such thoughts, let alone actions.

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