Abstract
Martin Wikelski. The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth. Vancouver, BC:Greystone Books, 2024, ISBN 1771649593.
This book is a lively discussion of animal behaviour and interaction with humans, told through short chapters on birds, bats, and cows, but also showing how the methods of collective intelligence can be used to amplify the world’s knowledge of itself.
The author, Martin Wikelski, is director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour, and founder of the Icarus project (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space), which analyses the global movements and migrations of thousands of animals in real time and uses the data collected to measure the state of our planet.
Most of the book tells the story of Icarus. The project was hugely ambitious and complex, involving global cooperation and countless technical and practical setbacks. The initial aim was to use satellites to track thousands of tags on birds, capturing data on acceleration and magnetic fields, temperature, humidity, and altitude to see if the bird was in a tree or on the ground. GPS chips were used to tell where the bird was and then another antenna was used to transmit to the satellite. Doing this involved many challenges, from the technical, like how to manage power with batteries that could draw on solar power but still work in the dark, frozen north, to the geopolitical during a period of rising tensions.
The promise was to capture animal intelligence in all its forms: since animal senses are finely tuned to changes in their environments, the data gained might make it easier to predict earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, track the spread of infectious diseases, identify changes in climate, and better protect endangered species. The main interest was with birds, but other animals could play their part too: a spin-off project using animals to predict earthquakes or aftershocks employed a particularly sensitive cow.
Icarus eventually went live in March 2020, just before the COVID pandemic hit. That turned out to be less of a challenge than the invasion of Ukraine 2 years later which brought the project into political controversy. A Russian general claimed that Icarus had developed a genetically modified bird flu designed only to affect Slavic people and had then deliberately sent infected birds into Russia to spread it, a biological invasion by Ukraine. The storyline came from a James Bond film.
Fortunately, the distributed nature of the project meant that it could survive the loss of one of its main collaborators, in this sense mirroring the early vision of the Internet. Icarus’ aim is to link up thousands if not millions of living creatures to provide a real-time picture of the state of the world: ‘the power of the internet of animals is derived from the fact that the gathering, processing and analysis of information will be distributed in a bottom-up way around the globe…’
The book is readable and informative, and the Icarus project deserves to be widely known, as it’s a remarkable example of collective intelligence, in this case combining animal, human, and machine intelligence. Tastes will differ on the preference for anecdote over analysis (which was probably the publisher’s steer), but this is a unique account of a way of doing science that would have been impossible a generation ago.
Stephen Boucher, Carina Antonia Hallin and Lex Paulson. The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance, 2023, Routledge, Abingdon, UK, ISBN 1032105550.
This big book (550 pages) explores the many concepts, methodologies, and implications of collective intelligence for democratic governance, in the first comprehensive survey of this field. Dozens of authors have contributed, with both theoretical overviews and many case studies from countries including Iceland, Taiwan, Denmark, Senegal, India and Morocco.
The main interest is in how democracy can be rethought as a system for collective intelligence, making the most of the brain power of citizens rather than depending on them only for votes every few years. That takes the book into many of the key fields of collective intelligence including crowdsourcing, deliberation, forecasting, citizen science, as well as collaborative problem solving. Although the emphasis is on new tools, and in particular online ones, there are also some excellent longer essays which put the present initiatives in a historical perspective, including a chapter by one of the editors, Lex Paulson, which sets out the history of collective intelligence in decision-making, from pre-history through ancient Athens to the present day.
The picture painted is necessarily messy and complex. Some of the recent experiments in democracy were failures, like the attempts to involve the whole population in reshaping Iceland’s constitution after the financial crisis. Some are uneven – like President Macron’s use of a citizen assembly to advise on climate change: although their recommendations were at first accepted, and then challenged and watered down, by some counts more than half are now on their way to implementation.
Some of the experiments are well documented, like Taiwan’s digital parliament and the various initiatives introduced and promoted by minister Audrey Tang, or the Decidim software developed by Barcelona under Mayor Ada Colau in the mid-2010s to enable citizen engagement in proposing and debating ideas, which was made available open source to dozens of other cities that now use it.
Others are probably less known, like Nigeria’s use of participatory methods in shaping its legislation for start-ups or very local examples from Denmark, some involving Carina Hallin, one of the editors. Many will also be unfamiliar with India’s traditions of democratic innovation, including ultra-local Panchayats and methods like the ‘jan sunwais’ community consultations described here.
A theme in several of the pieces is the growth of experiments to use AI to enhance collective intelligence in democracy. The Poli.s software has now been used in many places to help groups come closer to a consensus. Other experiments have used different natural language processing tools to organise the inputs from consultations and to show the balance of opinion on topics and where there may be space for alignment.
Together the chapters show a lively field full of experiment that is grappling with some long-standing questions: • How to ensure wide and representative participation, since, even now, digital platforms tend to be quite skewed in the make-up of their users? • Which types of topic work best for mobilising different kinds of collective intelligence – since some emphasise expertise, others lived experience, others still citizen motivation? • How best to connect methods like citizens assemblies to representative democracy and bureaucracy? In most cases, there have to be points of connection and combination, but getting this right is tricky.
Incumbents who have thrived in older models of democracy are bound to be suspicious of new methods, and many promising experiments have had a few years of success before being rejected by elected politicians. Many of the more radical experiments have been initiated by new political parties – older, and more established ones, tend to remain very resistant to innovation.
But all of the energies reflected here – from Ukraine to Brazil and India – reflect the desire of the public to be more active participants in decisions, and not just onlookers. Given the low levels of trust in democracy, and surveys showing a steady decline in confidence by age group in many countries, the ideas contained in this book provide a vital alternative to the counter trends which are leading towards more authoritarianism and a dumbing down of public debate.
The book can be downloaded free and is backed by a useful website run by the main editor, Stephen Boucher, which provides excellent case studies and blogs.
Hannah Critchlow. Joined Up Thinking: The Science of Collective Intelligence. London, UK: Hodder and Stoughton, 2022, ISBN 1529398398.
This is a very accessible canter through ideas about collective intelligence. It’s gained endorsements from a surprisingly wide range of people – from the novelist Ian Rankin to the former Archbishop of Canterbury – and will introduce new audiences to the core ideas of collective intelligence. Written in a chatty style, with occasional lists of exercises like a self-help guide, it covers a huge range of topics from neurodiversity to aboriginal ideas, cancel culture to conspiracy theories.
The author’s background is in cellular and molecular neuroscience, and this is the territory on which she is most assured. Diversions onto topics such as intuition are always intriguing, though contestable, and rely on quite selective use of the literature. There are also some glaring gaps – for example, no mention of prediction markets and other tools, or lessons from super-forecasters. The section on AI mainly focuses on brain-machine interfaces and doesn’t mention any of the extensive practical and research work combining AI and CI.
Many will come across new items of research that the book enthusiastically describes, alongside some interesting speculations, for example, on creating super-brain clouds as a response to the apparent evidence that IQ levels are declining after decades of improvement. The strength of the book is its readability and engaging style, using the methods of many science books which briskly move through examples of researchers and their findings.
A major weakness of the book is shared by a fair amount of neuroscience research and is paradoxical given the subject. Because the methods of neuroscience focus solely on individual brains, the discipline lacks theories or methods to understand cognition at larger scales. There are no frameworks to understand groups, movements, or organisations, even though these are the primary ways in which human societies organise collective intelligence.
As a result, this book suffers from a striking disciplinary bias. It contains almost no economics, sociology, anthropology, or computer science, which makes it hard to comment thoughtfully on live issues such as misinformation, or how the world solves its problems. This is a common weakness of many books about intelligence, so it is perhaps unfair to single this author out. But it makes the book a lot less ‘joined up’ than it could have been.
