Collective Intelligence Quotes

The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.

The smartest person in the room is never as smart as all the people in the room.

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

None of us is as smart as all of us.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted.

Through writing, Homo sapiens then became the first species to preserve learning, enabling knowledge to grow, ultimately at an exponential pace. Collective learning over time then became the source of technological improvement, a process that could move much faster than evolution.

The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its dumbest member divided by the number of mobsters.

Knowledge was meant to be shared.

A swarm finds the solution people best agree upon. It optimizes collective support, whereas a poll tells us how we disagree.

No company should depend on one person no matter how that person is smart or genius, whether it's Apple or News Corp, or Citibank or any other company in the world.

The thing that excites me, and the thing that excited me about Twitter, is the idea of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight.

Nobody is as smart as everybody.

I quite like the idea - just as an abstract idea - of 12 people's collective life experience and wisdom being this formidable thing. People say juries can be led - I think 12 people from different backgrounds, different races, different genders, different ages, it's hard to hoodwink.

Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent behaviour of the whole, this is progress.

We can be more clever than one, but not more clever than all.

Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia.

The combined results of several people working together is often much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone.

My personal fascination with the power of the crowd has been growing: Exactly what can a 'crowd' accomplish? We know crowds can raise billions of dollars, create Wikipedia, and even design and build small autonomous drones. But how about something large and complex like designing a new car, and maybe someday even a spaceship?

Successful organizations, including the Military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone's commitment and intelligence.

Story was that human civilization started to develop with first social network. Emerged where population concentration was high. Helped propel to where we are now. Facebook is next step of creating a huge human brain to embrace hundreds of million, possibly billions of people.

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.

I have confidence in people's basic common sense.

Genius is individual, scenius is communal.