The Hyper-Cortex of Human Collective-Intelligence Systems

I've just discovered a fascinating paper on The Hyper-Cortex of Human Collective-Intelligence Systems (.pdf) by Marko Antonio Rodriguez, a Ph.D student at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Center for Evolution, Complexity, and Cognition at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His interests lie in collective-intelligence algorithms for societal-scale decision support systems.

I believe his pioneering work on that subject has tremendous importance for realizing the potential of an enlightened society. I know, it is a bold statement about the research of a young scholar but I see Marko as one of the rising stars on the academic field of computationally-supported collective intelligence. I bet, he will soon join in depth and future-responsiveness such pioneers of that field as Francis Heylighen and Pierre Lévy .

Why is their work so pivotal to the emergence of global-scale collective intelligence? Because without computer-enabled CI algorithms and "computer assisted imagination" we (as networks, organizations and humankind itself) will be defeated by the complexity tsunami compunded by unwise decisions of self-centered, individual and collective egos at all scale.

That's just to say Marko Rodriguez' paper triggered lots of new questions and ideas in my mind but unfortunately, I can't give enough attention right now to clearly articulate, let alone explore them.

Instead keeping this entry unpublished till I'll have enough time to do justice to the issues presented in "The Hyper-Cortex of Human Collective-Intelligence Systems," I thought its abstracts (below), along with this introductory note, may inspire some of you to read the paper. If you do that and get fascinated by how the hypercortical framework of CI research may apply to your own area of work, please post your thoughts here.

"This paper extends the individual cortex model to encapsulate a socially-embedded hyper-cortex residing outside the individual, existing within the collective. The layers of a hyper-cortex represent information which is unable to be fully contained within any single individual.

These hyper-cortical layers are created by the aggregate interactions of multiple individuals over time. In order to represent abstract collective concepts, a hierarchy of layers can cluster similar lower layer regions into subjectively related ideas.

During specific problem-solving instances, an individual who is unable to locate an appropriate invariant solution within their cortex can use the collective’s hyper-cortex to derive a solution. In effect, a hyper-cortex functions as a pattern-matching infrastructure—mapping user realized problems to collectively-derived solutions."

Reading the full paper by Marko Rodriguez convinced me that our thinking about the ecosystem of the CI field will be very limited and inadequate to global problem-solving if we don't familiarize with the contributions from the sciences of collective intelligence.