Collective Intelligence

On a recent flight I was reading Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. I got stuck somewhere in the middle and then dozed off watching Avatar. (Brilliant. Best movie I've seen for a long time, even on a tiny in-seat monitor.) This combination got me thinking about a common theme in both: collective intelligence. Lanier is a skeptic. He writes“The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudian and Marxists [...] A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly [...] The Singularity and the noospehre, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversion.”And later, in a section “Why It Matters,” he writes “Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of the society.”I am very sympathetic to many points Lanier is making, but I dislike the “Manifesto”-style in which he's trying to lead his arguments. In any case, should I make it to the end of his book, I'll write a review. For now however, I want to focus on the topic of collective intelligence, for despite all the words Lanier is quite fuzzy on the use of terminology. I started wondering: What do people actually mean when they talk abo...