About

What is collective intelligence?

One simple definition of intelligence is the ability to achieve a goal. Throughout history, human society has progressed not primarily due to the superior intelligence of a few extraordinary individuals, but rather, because of the collective intelligence of groups: tribes on the savannah; the first city-states and empires in ancient times; and in the modern era, nation states, corporations, and world-spanning markets. 

What’s new over the past few decades is that advances in information technology, such as the Internet and artificial intelligence, now allow novel forms of collective intelligence to be created that are larger and more sophisticated than any that have previously existed. We use the term supermind, which means “a group of individuals acting together in ways that seem intelligent,” to refer to these new kinds of collective intelligence. It’s important to note that these combinations can include not only human minds but also computers, that is, “minds” embodied in silicon chips and software.

What does CCI do?

CCI’s mission is to understand collective intelligence at a deep level to be able to take advantage of the new possibilities it presents. Another way of saying this: we seek to learn about the workings of superminds so we and the world can build new kinds of superminds in the future. 

These aspirations are embodied in the animating question behind CCI’s work: 

How can people and computers

be connected so that

—collectively—

they act more intelligently 

than any person, group, or computer 

has ever done before?

Our hope is that CCI’s work will lead both to new scientific understanding in a variety of disciplines and to practical advances in many areas of business and society.

CCI’s role in the the field of Collective Intelligence 

Faculty at CCI have played a key role in creating the field of collective intelligence as a topic for scientific inquiry by organizing a conference series (beginning in 2012) and a journal (beginning in 2022) on this topic. Both the conference and the journal are sponsored by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), arguably the most important professional society in the field of computer science. Center faculty have also published widely cited work in this field. See, for example:

• Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 2010.
• Malone, T. W., and Bernstein, M. S. (Eds.) Handbook of Collective Intelligence. MIT Press, 2015.

CCI’s work

CCI currently focuses on three main areas of research:

• Scientific models of collective intelligence
• Empirical studies of collective intelligence
• Designing collectively intelligent systems 

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