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The benefits of Collective Intelligence is pretty self-evident and manifests in several shapes and forms in our everyday life.
As Thomas Maloney puts it, "Collective Intelligence is about groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent".
In fact, exhibiting collective intelligence is not just limited to human beings, but to the entire living species. Ants operating as a colony do remarkable things, when compared to the individual ant, which is not very bright.
In contrast, a single individual could function as a trimtab and is capable of steering the massive ship of humanity, by their individual intelligence.
Not just the Teslas and Einsteins of the world, but there are millions of us, albeit in differing Contexts and Grades.
Connected Intelligence is about creating a spontaneous network of individual intelligence that achieves a common purpose, without the need for a planned orchestration.
Technology presents many possibilities for designing affordances for the Connected Intelligence.
"The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type or create a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare."
In 2003, Plymouth University Researchers left six monkeys and a computer in a cage,for 4 weeks. All the monkeys could come up with, were long sequences of A.
The experiment probably was "fun" and not scientific, because the concepts of time, infinity and probability are in measures beyond the average human experience.
Even though, there are billions of people in the Planet, the number of people who bought, "The world is flat" is probably in the order of thousands, which is a small number.
The law of large numbers does not scale down very well. This is why the notions of collaborative filtering, i.e., boiling the consumption patterns of all users into one universal set, does not work.
However, my hypothesis is that: "a Monkey randomly curating tweets for an infinite amount of time will almost surely link to Hamlet".
If everyone in the planet talked at the same time, we would be hearing billions of speech, all at the same time. Thankfully, Nature has a mechanism to prevent this catastrophe, from happening.
Nature loves constraints. Take for example, the plain old Air. It enables transmission of Sound and at the same time, Air prevents Sound from going overboard.
Twitter is a medium unlike Air. It is merely a medium of transmission devoid of friction of any sort, which is why we could possibly get every tweet, from our neighbor to a gal in a distant land, all at the same time.
The work is only half-over. We need a way to be able to pay attention to the tweet of an interesting guy from our neighborhood. If he does not resonate with our present worldview, the tool should switch him automatically,with the gal in Finland, who is far more interesting to us.
This could be instrumented by an 'intelligent follower switch'. Your tuner in Scan Mode,switches to different stations, unless you pause and pay attention. This feature would be incredibly useful, if the switch is intelligent, based on what we listened to, in the past.
Constant switching could get annoying too. There is a delicate balance. Such a switch must have the right constraints designed in place, just like 140 characters is a fine constraint, that makes twitter what it is.
