This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.
The problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds.
An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.
We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.
And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant's thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It's distributed. It's in its legs.
A brain is a society of very small, simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking, that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together, out of that arises a kind of smartness.
That's what makes a human a human, if we store information outside our bodies.
We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.
