Hive Mind
Hive Mind is a concept that has been used to represent collective intelligence. Today, video games, financial tools and new social media applications are leveraging our human nature to “share” or combine our intellects. Future careers will combine computer science with biology, sociology and mass communications to take advantage of our networked culture.
While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. “How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?” This is the basic research question of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence.
Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. Collective intelligence appears in a wide variety of forms of consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans, and computer networks. The study of collective intelligence may properly be considered a subfield of sociology, of business, of computer science, of mass communications and of mass behavior—a field that studies collective behavior from the level of quarks to the level of bacterial, plant, animal, and human societies. The concept also frequently appears in science fiction as telepathically linked species and cyborgs.
“As we make our machines and institutions more complex, we have to make them more biological in order to manage them. The most potent force in technology will be artificial evolution. We are already evolving software and drugs instead of engineering them. Organic life is the ultimate technology, and all technology will improve towards biology. As we shape technology, it shapes us. We are connecting everything to everything, and so our entire culture is migrating to a network culture and a new network economics.” Excerpts are from the book Out of Control, written by Kevin Kelly, former editor-in-chief of WIRED Magazine.