IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2014 - 56

W

orldwide, societies are seeing
rapid change in
modes of social
interaction and organization. These new interaction
modes are predicated on emerging
forms of information infrastructure
together with rapidly evolving devices, systems, and applications
that are ever more deeply interwoven with our social fabric [1].
Computers and humans complement each other, as there are activities that are difficult or impossible
for one and easy for the other. We
argue that the key to activating the
potential for the new generation of
high-impact technologies and services aimed at enhancing human
problem-solving capabilities lies in
realizing a tight symbiosis between
human and computers. In this symbiosis, information and communications technology (ICT) becomes
an unobtrusive, pervasive extension
of individuals and groups, empowering and enabling them to achieve
ambitious objectives. We believe
that a new form of intelligence can
be devised to tackle complex and
challenging problems, by exploiting,
in a coordinated and holistic fashion, the complementary strengths of
human and machines through the
integration of computers, the Internet, individuals, and society. We
term this integration "social collective intelligence" (SCI).

Social Collective Intelligence
The power of social collective intelligence resides in the combination
of contributions coming from both
humans and computers. Humans
bring in their competences, knowledge, and skills together with networks of social relationships and
understanding of social structures.
On the other hand, ICT serves the
purpose of searching for, delivering, and storing relevant information that will be then employed
by individuals and collectives
in their contexts to achieve their
goals and, eventually, to improve
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the overall environment in which
they live. This combination allows
societal-scale coordination of
human capacities, and opens ways
of reasoning and problem solving
far beyond the capacity of an individual. The social collective intelligence results, therefore, from the
purposeful integration of computers, digital communication media,
individuals, and society, with the
objective of managing and solving
challenging global problems.
This approach has the potential to
greatly enhance the problem-solving
capabilities of individuals and groups
by combining the power of ICT with
the knowledge and competencies
of billions of people worldwide. By
leveraging human problem-solving
capability, SCI is particularly appealing when applied to large-scale
"wicked problems" [2], or problems
that are "relatively weakly specified" (in a computer science sense),
and whose solution is not unique, but
depends on social context in terms of
culture, norms, and regulations.
Yet, while the notion and features of SCI look appealing at
an abstract level, the engineering problem of how to effectively
"build" or "program" such systems
is a daunting, challenging problem.
The reason lies in the fact that
we are talking about complex sociotechnical systems, characterized by
a deep entanglement between technological artefacts and social constructs, where the scale of the system
and the level of interaction among
its components makes it difficult -
if even possible - to understand the
behaviors emerging at the systemwide level. The only way to reach
this understanding is by analyzing
the behaviors and interactions at the
level of individual components.
In addition, of course, we need to
account for the unpredictable nature
of human beings and social dynamics, which hardly fit traditional
"programming" logic employed by
computer scientists and engineers.
We are therefore left with the following question: "How to program

individuals, collectives, and machines
to build an SCI system that will be
able to achieve a desired goal?"
Note that the verb "to program" is
used here in a provocative sense, as
it is clear that in this setting we are
far from a system that can exhibit a
deterministic or controllable behavior, nor are we interested in going
towards a "big brother" vision, where
people lose their freedom such as in
the movie "The Matrix." We are,
rather, interested in systems made
"by the people for the people," where
social collective action, enabled and
empowered by advanced information
and communications technologies,
can help solve societal problems.

Examples
SCI is not about blue-sky research.
Society already provides a rich and
rapidly developing picture of SCI-like
systems. The emergence of mechanisms like crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and games with a purpose all
point to the potential for much more
systematic and large-scale interventions that greatly increase the capacity
of society to develop social computations [3] that unleash the power of
our "cognitive surplus" [4]. We now
provide here a number of examples
of SCI systems (in the broad sense),
highlighting both peculiar as well as
common features.
The first example refers to the
usage of social networking and
more in general, social media. These
are technologies that, while relying
on some social dynamics for their
functioning, are impact social structures in sometimes unexpected ways
(e.g., think of friending/unfriending
on Facebook [5], [6]).
Other examples include crowdsourcing and crowdsensing systems,
in which some computational tasks are
"delivered" to groups, and the "wisdom of the crowd" [7] is leveraged for
solving them. Another class of system
is the one that goes under the umbrella
term of "human computation," where
human skills are exploited to carry out
tasks at which computers are (comparatively) poor [8].

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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