Origins of Collective Intelligence
- Book: Pierre Levy, Aux Origines de L'Intelligence Collective.
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Interview
Interview with the author, Pierre Levy:
- Fabiano Incerti and Douglas Borges Candido: "In your books
- Collective Intelligence: For an Anthropology of Cyberspace (1994) and
- Cyberculture: The Culture of Digital Society (1997),
you argue that the Internet and digital technologies develop collective intelligence, enabling new forms of collaboration and knowledge sharing. However, there is growing concern that excessive use of social networks and digital technologies is associated with distraction and delayed learning among young people. How do you view this apparent contradiction between the potential of technologies to strengthen collective intelligence and the negative effects they can have on the cognitive and educational development of young people?
R2 - I never claimed that the Internet and digital technologies alone, and as if the technologies were autonomous subjects, would develop collective intelligence. I claimed that the best use we could make of the Internet and digital technologies was to develop human collective intelligence, which is very different. And that is still what I think. The idea of a “knowledge space” that could be deployed above the commercial space is a regulatory ideal for action, not a factual prediction. When I wrote Collective Intelligence – from 1992 to 1993 – less than 1% of humanity was connected to the Internet, and the Web did not exist. You will not find the word “Web” anywhere in the book. However, today – in 2024 – we have well over two-thirds of the world’s population connected to the Internet. The context is therefore completely different, but the change in civilization that I predicted 30 years ago today seems obvious, although normally we have to wait several generations to confirm this type of mutation. In my opinion, we are just at the beginning of the digital revolution.
As for increasing collective intelligence, many steps have been taken to make knowledge accessible to everyone. Wikipedia is a classic example of a company that works on collective intelligence, with millions of volunteer contributors from all countries and discussion groups among experts for each article.
There are almost seven million articles in English, two and a half million articles in French and more than a million articles in Portuguese. Wikipedia is consulted by tens of millions of people every day and several billion every year! Free software – now widely adopted and distributed, including by large web companies – is another important area in which collective intelligence is in command. Among the most widely used free software are the Linux operating system, the Mozilla and Chromium browsers, the OpenOffice suite, the Apache HTTP server (which is the most widely used on the Internet), the GIT version control system, Signal messaging and many others that would take too long to list. I would add that digitized libraries and museums, as well as open access scientific articles and sites like ArXiv.org, are common, which has been transforming the practices of scientific research and communication. Today, everyone can publish texts on their blogs, videos and podcasts on YouTube or other websites, which was not the case thirty years ago. Social networks allow the exchange of news and ideas very quickly, as we see, for example, on LinkedIn or X (formerly Twitter). The Internet has therefore truly enabled the development of new forms of expression, collaboration and knowledge sharing. There is still much to be done. We are only at the beginning of the anthropological transformation that is underway."
(https://www.pucpress.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/CADERNOS_DO_CONTEMPORANEO_0000_P.pdf)
More information
Excerpt from a book, on historical precedents for the concept. Extensive english summary by Martien van Steenbergen.