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Boosting Concept Discovery in Collective Intelligences
Francesca Arcelli Fontana
1
, Ferrante Raffaele Formato
2
, and Remo Pareschi
3
1
Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione.
Università di Milano “ Bicocca''
2
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Università del Sannio
3
Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie per l'Ambiente e il Territorio
Università del Molise
Abstract.
Collective intelligence derives from the connection and the interac-
tion of multiple, distributed, independent intelligent units via a network, such
as, typically, a digital data network. As collective intelligences are effectively
making their way into reality in consequence of ubiquitous digital communica-
tion, the opportunity and the challenge arise of extending their basic
architecture in order to support higher thought-processes analogous to those
characterizing human intelligences. We address here specifically the process of
conceptual abstraction, namely the discovery of new concepts and ideas, and, to
this purpose, we introduce the general functional notion of cognitive prosthesis
supporting the implementation of a given thought-process in a collective intelli-
gence. Since there exists a direct relationship between concept discovery and
innovation in human intelligences, we point out how analogous innovation ca-
pabilities can now be supported for collective intelligences, with direct applica-
tions to Web-based innovation of products and services.
1 Introduction
The age of digital networking has turned into a real option the possibility of a collec-
tive intelligence [12], namely the coordinated activities of independent intelligent
units into the activity of a larger intelligence, which finds its antecedents in a variety
of contributions from visionary thinkers across human history, starting from Plato's
panpsichic awareness to Bergson's and Deleuze's multiplicities and Verdnasky and
Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere. Indeed, why then are computers and computer net-
works, such as Internet
in primis
, so crucial in order to give reality to an idea that, in
various formats, has always been around? Precisely because they make it real by
embodying it into an extremely efficient bio-digital machine, capable of connecting
together multiple sources of intelligence through real-time interactions and of storing
the results of such interactions in a long term memory. As long as this machinery was
unavailable collective intelligence could not emerge as a new form of life.
Thus, the coming of age of collective intelligences can be viewed as an evolution-
ary milestone comparable, and to some extent analogous, to the appearance, roughly
2.5 billions of years ago, of modern eukaryotic cells, as found in most of the living
