Collective intelligence is the emergent capacity of interconnected autonomous systems to process information and act on shared objectives more efficiently and effectively than any single system. It is an emergent phenomenon in which diverse individuals, with different ideas, perspectives, and knowledge, leverage each other’s intelligence to create better decisions, products, and solutions than any one individual could generate on their own. It is fundamentally about collective optimization – seeking optimal outcomes through collective effort – and relies on collaboration and communication for shared understanding, learning, and wisdom.

See also: distributed cognition, feedback loop, game theory, possibility space