Collective intelligence or collecting intelligence?

Abstract

The ‘Open Data’, ‘Open Knowledge’ and ‘Open Access’ movements promote the dissemination of information for societal benefit. Sharing information can benefit experts in a particular endeavour, and facilitate discovery and enhance value through data mining. On-going advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are accelerating the development of invention machines to which few individual information donors have access. Is the movement toward open information further empowering the few? Does open information promote collective intelligence, or does the collection of information both from and about many individuals present a collection of intelligence that can be leveraged by a very few? We propose the Durham Zoo project to develop a search-and-innovation engine built upon crowd-sourced knowledge. It is hoped that this will eventually contribute to the sharing of AI–powered innovation whilst funding academic research.