Civilization is, in one sense, a set of tools for limiting competition and encouraging collaboration between people. The ability to coordinate and cooperate is crucial to developing solutions to global problems. One key development emerging is something that sociologists call collective intelligence. By contrast with our own individual intelligence, this capability emerges from certain kinds of organized group communications. The cheap (in some cases virtually free) computing and communications that has become available over the past decade is rapidly expanding the circumstances in which this phenomenon can emerge. Organizations and individuals are beginning to do things differently as a result.
Virtually everything businesses do, for example, can be enhanced as a result of the connected web of people that we build around us — Invention, product development, purchase decisions, support services — every point at which decisions are made and value is created through the knowledge component of our work.
