A Collective Intelligence Which Intrudes Without Intrusion

Whilst Harriet Harman is worried by recent developments, the longer-term future for all of us is almost certainly going to get bleaker:

Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.

But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.

Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. “There are so many uses for this technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can’t imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.

In a widely read Web posting, he argued that there were significant chances that it would be misused, “This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious.”

Collective intelligence. Crowd dynamics. Reality mining. All most innocuous-sounding. Or not, as the case may be. There are big things happening here:

For the last 50 years, Americans have worried about the privacy of the individual in the computer age. But new technologies have become so powerful that protecting individual privacy may no longer be the only issue. Now, with the Internet, wireless sensors, and the capability to analyze an avalanche of data, a person’s profile can be drawn without monitoring him or her directly.

Are we really so simple as all that? Can we really be reduced to a string of numbers? Are we really prepared to allow it to happen?

What universal irony finds us quite unremittingly hoisting ourselves up by our own technological petards? Why do we ceaselessly seem to prefer the massive processing of algorithms to the human touch that should surely separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom? Is the concept of collective intelligence simply a logical extension of - a logical conclusion to - the pathological giganticism and omnipotence of the 20th century corporation?

Is, in fact, collective intelligence - an intruder who no longer needs to physically intrude to effect his or her covert investigations - no more than a relatively trivial subset of an immense economic psychology that has, over the past century, taken us all by terrible storm?

Once companies were allowed to outlive their progenitors, wasn't all of this awfulness - all of this vast and unending desire to know everything about everyone, yet, at the same time, keep it all locked up behind closed doors until its utility became exactly clear - one day entirely inevitable?

It's the conflict - that is to say, the contradiction and lack of fit - between public and private spaces that gets me. On the one hand, we are bombarded with messages that encourage us to hum tunes in order that a swift glance across the supermarket shelves should encourage us to reach out an impulsive hand to make that eagerly sought-after purchase of the week. Nor does anyone care if we should decide to sing the song to a friend or quote the lyrics to a colleague. Quite the opposite, if truth be told. That's precisely how they make their sale. Yet as soon as this involves the conversation that is blogging on the Internet, God forbid that we should quote anything at all. As soon as this becomes more public than the confines of a pub, all hell may break loose. Yet a pub is as public a place as any blog ever was on this beautiful mind that is the interconnectedness of the Internet.

You can't have it both ways. You can't drum thought into people's heads on the one hand because you quite understandably want them to buy your products and on the other not expect them to want to share the very ideas that such thought provokes. Using whatever tools, whatever technologies, they most freely have to hand.

Marketing develops and anticipates us almost every step of the way these days.

But, perhaps, not quite.

Crowd dynamics, reality mining, collective intelligence - call it what you will. I still refuse to give up on the truly human touch. The truly felt and honest ability to surprise and confound the predictors.

In both our work as well as our home lives.

In both our private worlds as well as our public.

In both our speaking as well as our writing.

In both our relationships as well as our individuality.

In all these things, and more in fact, which so clearly separate us out from the worst excesses of this universe we still dare to call home.
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Further reading: Steve Steinberg on crowd dynamics

In one experiment, Eagle looked at how well he could predict an individual’s activities over a 12-hour period, based on their data from the previous 12-hours. After training a simple Hidden Markov Model, he could predict people’s behaviors with 79% accuracy. Additional experiments and results can be found at http://reality.media.mit.edu. (Warning: may provoke morose thoughts about just how structured and undynamic our lives really are.)