Perhaps the universe was telling me something, because it seems to me beyond coincidence that I don’t remember hearing the word “homophily” before and yet I’ve just come across it twice in the same day: once when listening to historian Niall Ferguson on the BBC’s Today programme while in the shower and then again a couple of hours later while reading Geoff Mulgan’s new book “Big Mind” on the couch. Homophily means the tendency of people (e.g., me) to tend to congregate online with people who think the same as they do (e.g., the Chancellor of the Exchequer is very probably insane) but worse still in the new online world, also view only “news” (fake or real) that reinforces their position.
We will come back to homophily in a moment.
Geoff’s thesis is that the "collective intelligence” formed from groups of people connected together online functions according to new dynamics. Now, while he notes early on that a more networked world does not automatically means a higher IQ world (in fact, as far as I can see, the general level of idiocy has increased substantially since the early days of the the telegraph and the bulletin board), and that "shared thought is not only knowledge but delusions, illusions and fantasies”, I’m not sure that Snapchat boosts either individual or collective IQs.
Hence I began with caution, and about two thirds of the way through the book I was caught in a terrible English dilemma. I’ve known the author for a long time and admired his work with Demos and NESTA. But I wasn’t enjoying the book and didn’t feel I was getting anything from it. So how could I say that politely?
Luckily I carried on reading and I realised that the first two-thirds of the book is not for people like me who spend their entire lives on LinkedIn and Twitter but for politicians and policymakers who have only the vaguest idea of what these new technologies are and just how different these new dynamics of the collective that they have created is from the collection of individuals that they are used to dealing with.
It’s the last third of the book where Geoff gets into the tough questions. I’d not heard of the “folk theory of democracy” (i.e., that the people are wise and come to the right answer) before but I can say with certainty that it is doomed with the masses so easily subverted through Facebook adverts and clickbait headlines. While it is appealing to hope that new technology is the answer, a means to rejuvenate democracy, I’m not sure. As the author notes, crowds are good at ideas, not judgements.
Do we then give decision making to an elite? Maybe, but the experts aren’t always right even when they are more connected than ever before. I strongly agree with the author’s view that “expertise can entrap”, or to put it another way, foxes make better predictions than hedgehogs, but we don’t seem to be rummaging through the dustbins of knowledge to pick out the good stuff at all. The example the author uses illustrates this rather well: we have more data about health and diet and nutrition than ever before, yet we have an epidemic of obesity. More data does not mean wisdom.
Which leads me to my suspicion is that it isn’t networking people together that is going to help, but networking people with artificial intelligences. As Geoff himself points out, technologies can effectively perform many of the elements of collective intelligence. He references a a Hong Kong investment firm has already invited an AI to join its board and given it the same vote as human board member.
A cabinet of ZX Spectrums could hardly do worse than the flesh and blood version. I laughed out loud when I saw “government is collective intelligence” since there’s precious little evidence of such (“government is muddling through” is more the British way). Geoff has had access to government decision-making process that I have not, so how accurate his characterisation is I can’t say. He certainly right when he says that companies pretend to operate with collective intelligence but actually go by gut feeling rules of thumb (as memorably described in one of my favourite books from last year “Chaos Monkeys”).
Geoff puts forward an interesting thesis but doesn’t completely convince with it. At the end of the book, I was left unsure whether he thinks that the online collective multi-intelligence of the connected crowd is something to be harnessed, managed or avoided at all costs.
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