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forms that are today inhabiting the earth, and as derived from ancient bacteria being
engulfed by pre-eukaryotes through a form of endosymbiotic cooperation. Just as
what is happening today, the availability of the appropriate biological infrastructure
made possible, to our bacterial ancestors, a fundamental evolutionary leap, as it had
not happened since the inception of life on Earth another billion years before and as
may happen again today.
Our general approach is the implementation of specialized software layers as kind
of cognitive prostheses for the strong integration of distributed intelligence units in
the performance of specific cognitive functions. In the millions years of history of
the human brain, the same role is played by specialized regions supervising higher
thought-processes. In that context, cognitive prostheses have been recently proposed
and engineered by bio-medical researchers (see for instance [5]) as a way of restoring
cognitive functions whose supervising regions have been damaged (as through the
effect of anoxia ) or have decayed (as in the case of Alzheimer disease). In the case
of collective intelligence, our aim is to use them to implement higher thought-
functions directly, thus supplementing through technology what nature has accom-
plished in the case of human intelligence.
Our specific target here pertains the activity of conceptual abstraction. Said in a
more direct way, we want to support the processes of thought that get done whenever
we utter, verbally or mentally, “I've got an idea!” or, to borrow the words of an an-
cient and most illustrious thinker and innovator, “Eureka!”. Abstraction can then
trigger innovation. Whenever this happens, something really new takes place, by
combining the new idea with existing knowledge and skills, and thus bringing it back
from the realm of abstraction into the real world where new things are created that
correspond to instances of the ideas. These can range, depending on the extent, the
nature and the quality of the novelty, from new tricks to make ends meet and new
ways to become wealthy by, say, manufacturing a type of ice-cream appealing to the
population living north of the artic circle, to revolutionary outbreaks and timeless
works of art. Of course, for this to happen, we do not need just new ideas but also
good
new ideas, but the point here is that ideas, once generated, immediately undergo
the process of natural selection and only the good ones make it back to the world by
being instantiated into something that did not exist before. Now, it is a fact that ideas
are generated not just by individuals but also by communities, which are themselves a
fundamental ingredient of collective intelligences. The ideation capabilities of com-
munities within corporate organizations have been widely studied, among others, by
Nonaka and Takeuchi in their book The Knowledge Creating Company [14] where
they introduce an interesting construction called the “Knowledge Spiral” that relates
the emergence of new ideas (“Knowledge Externalization” in their terminology) with
innovation. The Knowledge Spiral, illustrated in Figure 1, is composed of the follow-
ing four phases linked together in a continuous cycle:
--Internalization, during which ideas that have been accepted as innovative get
learned by people in the community that will use them to produce new artifacts, pro-
vide new services etc.;
--Socialization, during which the community develops a common understanding of
the ideas thus internalized;
