Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World

by Geoff Mulgan

A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This “bigger mind”―human and machine capabilities working together―has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results? Gathering insights from diverse fields, including philosophy, computer science, and biology, Big Mind reveals how collective intelligence can guide corporations, governments, universities, and societies to make the most of human brains and digital technologies.

Geoff Mulgan explores how collective intelligence has to be consciously organized and orchestrated in order to harness its powers. He looks at recent experiments mobilizing millions of people to solve problems, and at groundbreaking technology like Google Maps and Dove satellites. He also considers why organizations full of smart people and machines can make foolish mistakes―from investment banks losing billions to intelligence agencies misjudging geopolitical events―and shows how to avoid them.

Highlighting differences between environments that stimulate intelligence and those that blunt it, Mulgan shows how human and machine intelligence could solve challenges in business, climate change, democracy, and public health. But for that to happen we’ll need radically new professions, institutions, and ways of thinking.

Informed by the latest work on data, web platforms, and artificial intelligence, Big Mind shows how collective intelligence could help us survive and thrive.

Genres: Technology, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Society

288 pages, Hardcover

Published November 28, 2017

About the author

Geoff Mulgan is director of the Young Foundation. Between 1997 and 2004 he worked in the UK Prime Minister’s office and Cabinet Office and before that was the founding director of the thinktank Demos. He is a Visiting Professor at LSE, UCL, Melbourne University and the China Executive Leadership Academy. He also works as a part time adviser to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Australia. His latest book is The Art of Public Strategy: mobilising power and knowledge for the
common good

Reviews

[Christine Dimmick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collective Consciousness can change our world - unfortunately I found this book difficult to read and absorbed none of the content. Disappointed as I really was looking forward to a deep dive into this.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World by Geoff Mulgan is a book about how organizations can use their soft resources, the ones that don’t show up on the balance sheet, to become more effective in setting and achieving their mission. Big Mind is a well-researched, well-written and well-organized book. Citations are abundant, relevant and informative to the material on hand. Big Mind provides a theoretical framework for organizations to apply to both emerging and existing problems. The problem with Big Mind is two-fold. The first is that it treats the problems that organizations face in a vacuum. Geoff Mulgan himself admits several times in the book that solutions he obtained with this method fail. They failed because of a lack of time and resources, major components of a solution that are not addressed under the Big Mind framework. The second issue with the book is that it does not include best practices from other fields like engineering and biology. Engineering has a rigorous process for developing, delivering and maintaining solutions while accounting for practical issues like limited time and resources. Biology, and specifically evolution, is a process for ensuring survival under scarce resources and flourishing in abundant times. Big Mind is a first step for organizations looking to get smarter about how they approach problems, but it needs anchoring in the realities that the solutions must endure.

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

The gist is that Mulgan is trying to understand collective thinking, its flaws and benefits, to build AI systems that help better inform society about how to run it self. How can understanding collective intelligence inform how we build or rebuild democracy, medicine, other important parts of society? Mulgan might not have all the answers but he brings up a lot of good questions.

[Daniil Bratchenko · Rating 2 out of 5]

Collective Intelligence is a topic that interests me both personally and professionally. A large part of my job is to help humans and machines collaborate well. This is why I pre-ordered this book and was looking forward to reading it.

My enthusiasm got me 25% through the book. Then I realized that I cannot recall anything I’ve read. The book is just a stream of sentences that sound meaningful, but do not convey any ideas. At least to me. Maybe I do not possess the right knowledge or context to appreciate what author tries to tell.

In any case, this book was one of the biggest disappointments in the past couple of years. Do not recommend.

[Darren · Rating 5 out of 5]

You may have heard about ‘big data’, the buzzword de jour that promises a lot of benefits, but perhaps not so much the phrase ‘big mind’. The concept of using collective intelligence to think at scale shouldn’t be so unclear. What it means and how it is utilised, however, can be something else.

Enter this book, providing a credible and accessible look at the field of collective intelligence, considering how human and machine-minds can be harnessed to solve the big problems of the future. It is not, however, just a case of throwing resources at the problems. So-called smart technologies may be smart, in a limited scale, but they are not miracle workers. A multidisciplinary, multi-format approach is needed, and even then nothing is guaranteed. A room full of smart people does not necessarily mean that only smart decisions will emerge either: often the inverse happens!

Yet developments are happening at a seemingly breakneck speed. Even in my soon half-decade on this earth, things I couldn’t imagine as a child as being reality are existing today. It is not so long ago that even getting live video, on a postage stamp-sized computer window, connected by modem was seen as amazing. Now we may complain when our high-definition or 4K video buffers or has an artefact, streamed from a 4G mobile phone when sitting in our garden. The ability to process massive amounts of data for good (and at times less-good) things is amazing too. All this is here today, but oh-so-much-more is waiting for the future and the real smart stuff may come with the next-generation of business, education and human thinking, aided by the technology developed at the same time.

Getting there, however… So, this is a timely, enjoyable book. It gave a lot for both specialist and generalist alike. It was written to service both audiences and can really draw you in. The author has credibly analysed the status quo today and sought to consider how this evolution may continue to leverage tomorrow’s benefits, with collective collaborative intelligence at its core.

Consider this to be more of an essay about the scope and potential of the collective mind. It is not a typical textbook, although it can certainly be used to sustain and extend debate. Mankind has a great potential ahead of it, but also it has displayed the ability time after time to pursue evil rather than good. Inevitably some of the ‘big mind’ developments will be used in a negative way, but hopefully positive developments will prevail. Of course, if the nirvana or threat of machines thinking for themselves and operating truly independently takes place – a machine with a brain and conscience – there is a risk that the fight between good and evil will then take place at the system level… the stuff science-fiction can be made of.

This book is not a whacky science-fiction dreaming book. It has its collective insight firmly anchored to the ground, provoking thought and interest into a subject that has a lot of yet-to-be-realised potential. It is highly recommended and very more-ish!

[Jan Höglund · Rating 2 out of 5]

Geoff Mulgan writes that he was helped writing Big Mind by his PhD in telecommunications. This surprised me since I don't see the connection between telecommunications and collective intelligence. Or, rather, it's not that connection that I am interested in. I am, however, as interested as Mulgan in the space between the individual and the totality of civilization, but I think it's a mistake to reduce it to a study of digital systems.

Geoff Mulgan's bigger mind is the brainpower of people and machines. Mulgan's central claim is that every individual, organization, or group can thrive if it is tapped into this bigger mind. The book is about methods, tools, and resources, and how these can be consciously orchestrated by specialist institutions and roles.

Geoff Mulgan hopes that new kinds of consciousness will be generated as human brains and digital intelligence are combined. Well, it depends on what you mean by consciousness and intelligence. Machines are not conscious, and calculation is not intelligence.

My point is that collective intelligence is as old as the human species. It's that intelligence I'm interested in, and it has nothing to do with digital machinery. Connecting humans with machinery, digital or not, has on the contrary a tendency to turn us into machines.

[Shhhhh Ahhhhh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting book. Largely in agreement with its premise. We don't prioritize our institutions to be intelligent. However, I think that the author fails to appreciate why that is. We're creating an ecosystem from scratch and individual organisms from scratch. If you consider a business as a multicellular organism, then, at best, I think we can expect the behavior to look like amoebas. We shouldn't expect mouse, or even chimpanzee behavior. That takes a lot more work, and failure, and iteration, and integration, then we currently have and maybe more than we can hope to have. Every cell in the human body does its task, only its task, for its entire lifespan. Variations in task ability, on average, lead to disorders that can easily be fatal to the host body. Cancer is one such. Try and build a human where cells migrate and change roles, where performance is variable from cell to cell but results must somehow be (on average) invariant, and where cells frequently leave one body and move to another, and see how quickly that fails.

Again, I largely agree. Our society could benefit from smarter groups. I also think that's possible on a small scale, much like true democracy. Everything else is up for debate.

[Chris Weatherburn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps best described as thought provoking not a great deal of personal learning points from this book, below is my summary.

If the gap between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and and Human Intelligence is narrowed major problems the world faces could be solved.

People who know how to harness AI are located in a few places in the world and therefore allowing all people to benefit from these technological advances is difficult.

Knowledge needs knowledge about the knowledge.

The three loops of active intelligence are:

Thinking about things
Changing the categories with which we think about things
Changing how we think

The more reflexive any group is, the more intelligent it is in the long run.

Cognitive economics: the view of thought as involving inputs and outputs, costs and tradeoffs. In applying this principle to every day life one thought about something means you can’t think about a different thing.

If you like this please check out my website: www.chrisweatherburn.com

[Reed · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is a lot of ground covered in this book — history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, organizational behavior, and computer science. I enjoyed some of the anecdotes , eg Ernest Hemingway and the 6 word novel. There were also several outstanding quotes. The topic is broader than crowdsourcing and AI. However, The writing is rather dense and I found myself skimming entire sections. While I will retain several good ideas from this book, ultimately this could easily be distilled down into a book less than half of its original length. A few magazine articles could also have covered the major learnings.

[Ugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

An overview of the state of collective intelligence, and the hope that by thinking together and with machines we can innovate better as a hive mind than we can alone. It's not a page-turner, so probably only for people with an interest in policy and how people can better spend their time, but it is generally pretty interesting and authoritative-feeling. Mulgan is clearly very smart, experienced and well read. He's perhaps not the world's greatest writer, but hell, you can't have everything. Plus I read an uncorrected page proof, so probably the final version will be improved in that regard.

[Mr R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating concept and exploration of ideas aroudn collective intelligence. Really interesting read for someone who works in large organisations, recommend it. How decisions can be reached, the challenges and limitations created by collective thinking. Going well beyond the well known ideas around group think and peer pressure. It starts to explore strategies to pull the best out of groups discussions by controlling numbers, who talks first, providing structures and focus. However, it does not fully commit to being a book that addresses this, and reverts back to being descriptive.

[Alexand · Rating 2 out of 5]

لم استطيع استعاب الكتاب معنه مصطلحاته و لغته بسيطة جدا لكن شعرت ان الكتاب يتقدم بلغة بسيطة و فجأة يعطي مفهوم ما هو مبني له اثناء القراءة من ثمة ينتقل لمفهوم يومي طبيعي و عادي جدا و يستمر كذا الكتاب ما ادري هل مستواه جدا بسيط لدرجة ما هتميت بالمكتوب او الكتاب مبني على معارف مسبقة
لكن فيه فصول جميلة جدا و شروحات جميلة لكن المجمل ما عجبني

[Ezra · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was okay. Too technocratic for my taste. I almost didn't read when I saw on the author bio that he'd worked for Tony Blair.

[Liusmiler323 · Rating 3 out of 5]

not a very good book. No new ideas, no applicable solutions, just a set of questions in a well-organized manner....

[Brock · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s fine. I was interested in the concept of collective intelligence and this book discusses some organizational methods surrounding the topic. Read it a bit ago and can’t say I remember too much of it

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not what I expected. This is mostly self promotion and politics.

[Alfie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Felt like I was reading a textbook with lots of philosophical quotes sprinkled in. Not necessarily a bad thing! Just not an easy read despite being a very interesting topic.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tough read. The ideas are interesting and the thought process is compelling. However the book is written in a very theoretical way, without many tips or practical applications.

[Maurizio Codogno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nella prima parte di questo libro il lettore potrebbe pensare che Geoff Mulgan pensi alla creazione di un'entità simile ai trekkiani Borg: l'intelligenza collettiva sarebbe insomma qualcosa di legato più ai computer che alle persone. In realtà non è così. Almeno nel breve o lungo termine, quello che Mulgan pensa è il modo per coordinare meglio e migliorare la gestione di un qualunque sistema complesso, sfruttando armonicamente i tre cicli di apprendimento: quello di base incrementale, quello di mezzo con l'introduzione di nuove idee e quello di distruzione creativa da usare con estrema cautela ma che si deve avere a disposizione. Mulgan lavora da decenni in questa direzione, e attualmente è il deus ex machina del Nesta, un think tank britannico che si dedica a questi temi: è sicuramente un personaggio vulcanico e molto british, anche se ogni tanto mi sa esageri un po' nel mostrare quante belle cose ha fatto nei sui progetti. Il libro non nasce comunque per dare soluzioni ma per mostrare problemi e possibilità della creazione di un'intelligenza collettiva, e da questo punto di vista è indubbiamente stimolante, oltre a dare una visione diversa di quanto abbiamo già oggi: consiglio tra l'altro il capitolo sulla trattazione dei beni comuni.
Ho qualche dubbio sulla traduzione di Gianni Pannofino, non tanto sui neologismi com "macchinico" che nel contesto ci sta quanto su apparenti anglicismi come "disposizione dei lavoratori" oppure "commettere suicidio"/

[Jungwon Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is a good reminder of important questions on how collective intelligence could be formed, sustained and make real impact on a current society. However, it touches on far too many related quotes, words, and cases, which often leads a reader to get lost from the main point, rather than being focused. I found it a rather pedantic. For anyone who is familiar with this subject, the argument and cases are not very new, and for anyone who is not familiar with this subject, its description sounds still quite abstract and not so focused.

[Lorenzo Barberis Canonico · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really worth it. Repeats a lot of examples from much better books in the literature.