Information Technology, Collective Intelligence and the Evolution of Human Societies

One of the best ways of demonstrating the existence and importance of collective intelligence in humans is to contrast the announcement of the discovery of the X-ray in the 1890s with a corresponding event in the 1980s — the announcement of the discovery of the W-boson (as reviewed by Pais 1986). Conrad Roentgen performed the experiment by himself, and his first publication announcing the discovery of X-rays carried only his name as sole author. In contrast, the report providing clear evidence for the existence of the W-boson was signed by 135 authors coming from twelve European and two North American institutions. Furthermore, while the nineteenth-century scientists tended to work in makeshift laboratories of their own making, their late-twentieth-century counterparts tend to work in government- or institution-supported laboratories of great sophistication. The group which announced the discovery of the W-boson working underground at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Centre, required not only the ingenuity and expertise of many hundreds of minds at CERN working on the administrative, technical and scientific aspects, but thousands more working across the world to provide the scientific, technical, administrative, political and financial back-up necessary for so large an enterprise expending hundred of millions of dollars of public funds.