Title:
Collective Intelligence
Speaker:
David Thorburn, MIT Professor of Literature
Subject:
Collective Intelligence
Area:
Other
Type of school:
MIT
School name:
MIT
Lecture Link:
Country:
United States
Course language:
English (United States)
Course media:
Video
Course duration:
Contributor:
jakob@sandvad.com
Comments:
MODERATOR: David Thorburn
More on David Thorburn
PANELISTS:
Thomas W. Malone: Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management
Sloan Faculty Profile page
Malone's page on the Center for Coordination Science site
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
Alex (Sandy) Pentland: Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Director of Human Dynamics Research, MIT Media Lab
Pentland's Media Lab site
Karim R. Lakhani: Assistant Professor, Technology and Operations Management Unit, Harvard Business School
Lakhani's HBS website
ABOUT THE PANEL DISCUSSION:
Can human beings, with the help of smart machines, not merely avoid “collective idiocy” (in Sandy Pentland’s words), but actually achieve a degree of intelligence previously unattainable by either humans or machines alone? These three panelists study the possibilities from different angles.
Thomas Malone’s Center for Collective Intelligence examines such evolving intelligent systems as Wikipedia, which relies on a veritable army of volunteers to “create a high quality product with almost no centralized control,” and Google, with its technology “harvesting knowledge” and serving up answers to a vast audience of seekers. While a crowd doesn’t guarantee the best solution to a problem, Malone sees opportunities in “prediction markets,” where humans, with the computational help of computers, predict things with greater accuracy than single experts, whether in electoral politics, or in medical diagnostics. Malone’s research is also attempting to set up metrics to measure the intelligence of these new human group-machine hybrids, and ways of applying collective decision making to climate change policy.
Alex (Sandy) Pentland performed a unique experiment in a large German bank, tagging its employees with special badges that tracked individuals’ interactions, down to head nodding, body language, and tone of voice. His research, conducted over a month, looked at how face to face interactions played into the overall organizational flow. The patterns he uncovered in the data collected from his name badges and from email and more traditional documentation, demonstrated the significance of social dynamics in workplace productivity. Certain individuals acted as information bottlenecks; others as polarizers, group thinkers, or gossip mongers. Pentland shared information about these patterns of communication with individuals. “Rather than think of this as big brother,” says Pentland, “think of this as a personal intelligence tool that collectively produces better results.” Related technology might be able to detect depression by examining a person’s patterns of socialization.
Karim R. Lakhani says he “stumbled into collective intelligence and distributed information systems as a puzzle.” While trying to market his large corporation’s medical imaging system, he discovered that a small Canadian group had “leapfrogged” his R&D team. A community of radiologists and physicists pooled their expertise to improve imaging technology, and beat a large, centralized lab. Since that time, Lakhani has pursued other examples of decentralized groups of people with a wide range of motivations, efficiently cracking complex problems-- from the open source software community, to biotech labs and entrepreneurial ventures. A T-shirt company, Threadless, asks its online community of a half million to submit T-shirt designs, and vote on them. The best scoring designs go into production. Sales are closing in on 1.5 million shirts at $20 a pop. Says Lakhani, “One hope of collective intelligence is that it takes the distributed and sticky pockets of knowledge that exist in the world and finds ways to aggregate them for us.”
NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 2:00:40.
David Thorburn, Director, Communications Forum, introduces the session and Thomas Malone, Alex (Sandy Pentland), and Karim Lakhani. (NB: The video starts with Thorburn in progress.) He asks Malone to start with an overview of the subject of collective intelligence.
At 5:09, Malone begins. (NB: Malone’s audio is low until 6:30.)
At 13:04, Pentland begins.
At 25:07, Karim R. Lakhani begins.
At 35:24, Malone describes projects at the Center for Collective Intelligence.
At 42:03, Thorburn admits to skepticism in reaction to the “utopian discourse” surrounding collective intelligence and asks panelists to ponder limitations to the “collective intelligence tendency.”
At 52:21, Thorburn asks a question that’s “half intellectually unfriendly.” He wonders, “Is the best we can hope for from collective intelligence that we can sell more T-shirts in creative ways? What about applications in realms of culture and human behavior that do not involve profit and loss?”
At 53:30, Malone responds.
At 1:01:11, Thorburn opens the session to audience Q&A.
Questions include: Pentland’s “sociometric badge” and how it impacts interactions; how to train people to do collective work; the connection between chaos and collective intelligence; how to prevent mass stupidity, and concerns about the evolution of a surveillance culture; the need for face to face contact in communities to develop trust; the role of motivation in projects of collective intelligence; the impact of collective intelligence on individual intelligence; how to prevent people from gaming the system; can a group have an artistic vision or is that the property of a single artist.
The information on this page was accurate as of the day the video was added to MIT World. This video was added to MIT World on 2007-11-07.