Thinking Clearly About Collective Intelligence: A Conversation with Geoff Mulgan about his new book Big Mind — David Sloan Wilson interviews Geoff Mulgan

Knowing all of this has tremendous potential for recognizing collective intelligence in human life where it currently exists and socially constructing it where it is needed. However, most of what I have recounted is new, emerging only within the last two or three decades, and is often not reflected in the thinking of otherwise smart people on the subject of collective intelligence. In particular, there is a tendency to naively assume that collective intelligence emerges spontaneously from complex interactions, without requiring a process of selection at the level of the collective unit.

It was therefore with trepidation that I began reading Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World, by Geoff Mulgan—founder of the think tank Demos, director of the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and head of policy under Tony Blair, and current chief executive of Nesta, the UK’s National Endowment for Science. That made him smart—but was he smart about collective intelligence from a modern evolutionary perspective?

To my delight, I found him very well informed, clearly recognizing that collective intelligence only exists under very special conditions, which makes it both present and absent in human life. In addition to his conceptual understanding, his book is filled with examples from his extensive policy experience that were previously unknown to me, along with practical advice about how to enhance collective intelligence where it does not already exist….

This View of Life
Thinking Clearly About Collective Intelligence: A Conversation with Geoff Mulgan about his new book Big Mind

David Sloan Wilson, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University and Arne Næss Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. interviews Geoff Mulgan, Chief Executive of the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA)

See also

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Plants Are Better at Complex Decision-Making Than We Ever Realised

David Nield