Mick MacComascaigh
Research Director
Even now I still find myself fascinated when observing the intricate activities on a common, everyday anthill! What seems so chaotic and disjointed up close becomes ever more coherent and understandable as the perspective broadens and the collective results emerge. Given nature has inspired our creativity in medicine, aviation and countless other endeavours, what lessons can we glean from the activities of our 6-legged teachers? Will their innate ability to act individually while being part of a greater entity guide our own thinking with regard to human collectives and their applications?
I think it can.
It can be argued that social software facilitates in some ways the next evolution of interaction between individuals, among groups and within a collective. Such social networks can be built upon our desires to be regarded in a context greater than our immediate surrounds. It is a way of balancing the need for individuality while providing the very social set in which this uniqueness can find its definition. However, this is cultural development still in its infancy. The true value of this sociological phenomenon has yet to be tapped fully.
It can therefore be useful to consider humanity as a platform for a special set of applications, social software the operating system for this platform and applications that are built upon this platform being either reactive or proactive in how they yield the desired value. In the case of reactive applications, it is already well established how important pattern detection is in enterprises. Detected sociological patterns help e.g. with planning cities while buying patterns and related anomalies help detect credit card fraud. Applications of this nature are already mainstream and will yield popular benefits in the coming years.
But can the proactive applications built on this social platform also yield a high value and share the same, or even a greater success? The one application that continues to capture imaginations it that where collective intelligence can be formed, enhanced and tapped. It is one which allows the most challenging problems to be solved more quickly and the innovative creativity of collaborating individuals to be greatly magnified. In the past months, our disgust at the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was sometimes accompanied by impotence at not being able to contribute coherently to a solution. Some might argue this cannot change: the patent system together with our traditional awe of individual inventors has long preserved our culture of isolated acts of genius and an individual’s pursuit of excellence.
However, the problems humanity faces are huge and the potential of collective excellence that can still be tapped limited only by our imaginations. Collectives will continue to emerge, morph, gather momentum and clarify their direction. It is incumbent upon us to regard collective intelligence as the “killer application” for our social platform and establish an exciting base for the next phase of our cultural evolution.
If ants can do it, I think we can too.
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[...] Collectives will continue to emerge, morph, gather momentum and clarify their direction. It is incumbent upon us to regard collective intelligence as the “killer application” for our social platform and establish an exciting base for the next phase of our cultural evolution.Read more at blogs.gartner.com [...]