Nick Bostrom has described collective intelligence as “joint problem‐solving capacity”. There are many examples of problems that have been solved by more than a single individual and which probably could not have been solved by a single person. When a new drug is discovered and developed it is not done by a single person but by a team of people working toward a collective goal, sometimes in collaboration with other teams performing similar, related research. Projects such as the Human Genome Project was a massive research project that was only able to achieve its goal by the collective research of twenty teams across six countries over thirteen years. In our daily lives we often tackle jobs at work that require the cooperation of several people or large teams to solve problems and implement solutions. We are surrounded by evidence that our problem-solving potential is increased by combining the skills of multiple individuals. This increase in potential is realized for two reasons.

First, we have an additive effect. Think of a simple example where our goal is to identify all red objects in a warehouse. A single individual may be able to pick out and identify each object in 1 second. Therefore they can sort through 60 objects per minute, 3600 objects in an hour. But if we can enlist ten people to take on this task, assuming they are all able to sort through objects at the same rate, we can sort through 36,000 in an hour. In other words, we can accomplish the task ten times as fast! This is of course a rather simple uninteresting example, but this is the way many tasks are accomplished. The pyramids of Egypt were built this way, and many intellectual tasks are as well.

The second reason we can accomplish difficult tasks more easily with a group is due to the breadth of skills required to complete the task. We live in an increasingly complex world and the problems we are faced with are constantly increasing in complexity as well. As the tasks become more complex, solving them requires an ever-increasing array of problem-solving skills. While this phenomenon has been evolving for a long time, the first good example with a significant impact is found in Henry Ford’s approach to building the automobile. Rather than relying on a single individual or even a few individuals with the requisite skills to build a car, he broke the overall tasks into smaller tasks requiring a degree of skill that could be developed in the workers in a short amount of time. Today we see an even greater divergence of skills required in our world. Think of the number of people that contribute to the treatment of a patient during their stay at a hospital. Even going to a store to buy something sometimes involves several people. We ask where we can find what we are looking for and are directed to the correct department. Once there we can’t find what we are looking for and have to ask someone who works in that department. We then ask them about some feature of the product, they don’t know the answer and go find someone who knows more about that product. Finally, we go to the register where we pay for what we have selected. While this may not seem like something that exemplifies the height of human intelligence, it demonstrates how much of what we undertake relies on the knowledge of multiple individuals. This is a simple form of collective intelligence.

There is one more aspect of collective intelligence that is important to recognize. In the past we see examples of a brilliant individual such as Thomas Edison or Alexander Bell who were great innovators. But even these great names relied on the discoveries and knowledge gained from others, some their contemporaries and some from the past. More than any other species, humans have the ability to learn from their predecessors. This ability is referred to by Michael Tomasello and Steven Mithen as cultural learning. In its simplest form it can be seen as a child learning not to cross the street without looking for oncoming cars. It can be seen as the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic that we learn in our first few years of school. It is seen in our education where we learn the necessary skills for our careers. Although we don’t often think of it, when we attend a year of school to learn a trade or skill we are learning skills and knowledge that took hundreds of years to accumulate. The long term effect of this type of knowledge transfer is incredible. It is what has allowed us to develop rocket ships that fly to the moon and understand the complex system we know as the human body. It is what has led to the development of  the computers that are so advanced, so fast, so intelligent – that they may soon surpass us in intelligence in its every form.