Public Intelligence Blog

Of cooperation between men and machine

For a peer-to-peer approach to collective intelligence

It’s eight a.m. on a Monday morning in 2007. In the Arcueil examination centre, a thousand heads crane with difficulty over wooden desks that are damaged by pens scratching across thin sheets of paper. Railway lines surround the enclave; trains make the building shudder rhythmically; the heads lookup for a minute, distracted, then return to concentrate on the studious, urgent writing of their paper. Invigilators wander the rows, imperturbable, watching every head that turns, every hand hiding in jean pockets. Only the noise of crumpled paper can be heard and, when this fades away, the room is deathly silent. A thousand pupils have been gathered here for six hours to answer a difficult question. All interaction with their peers is forbidden and, if an unexpected memory lapse should halt their train of thought, they cannot consult their notes. The essays produced by the pupils will sink into oblivion, stored in a dedicated hanger that has housed examination papers for many generations.

A few years later, I’m facilitating an all-day workshop in a large white room with some twenty computers. Around me, groups of pupils talk, laugh and see-saw between a sheet of drawing paper and the computer screen. Some isolate themselves to code, others are hunched over a 3D printer producing an open source design that they’ve just downloaded. The pupils consult their teachers, ask advice from the experts present in the room and share their progress with the others. Some momentarily leave their own group to help their friends in a competing group. The workshop involves “remixing” artistic works that have come into the public domain or are open source. No assessment is planned; the reaction of those present is the only measure of the quality of their production. Watching them, I think that they are extremely lucky to be able to draw freely from all these wells of existing knowledge: their own intelligence, that of their peers and teachers, virtually everything that humanity has produced and, above all, the global knowledge which is within easy reach. At the end of the workshop, we find their work surprising and original and the quality exceeds all our expectations. Our doubts about the pupils’ capacity to open up the raw materials and extract a structured form from them were unfounded. Now they make us smile.

We are connected to an infinite number of individuals, organisations and machines. In my view, the cooperation of all of these entities, regardless of the nature of their intelligence, is what defines collective intelligence

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