Collective Intelligence

Someone once told Steve Jobs that the person standing on the interaction of science and design is destined to rule the world. And I am pretty sure Steve took it very seriously. It is evident in all his inventions in years to come.

I think the next wave of achieving greatness is going to be those people standing at the cross section of human and artificial intelligence. That is the technology everest that people and companies across the world are trying to climb and claim.


In this race, there might be a first movers advantage, but like in all startup races - the one who wins is not the one who comes first, but the one who is considered the last man standing.

We can broadly divide the tools that human being built into following three category -

  1. Passive Tools - They do what you ask them to do. Suppose you have a knife. It will cut a vegetable where ample pressure is applied across its sharp edges. Nothing more and nothing less. These are considered essentially passive tools. 
  2. Learning Tools - You can have a machine learning trading strategy that can optimize a set of parameters for most profit. This will be an exhaustive and iterative process, comes with a reasonably probability to make estimation, but doesn't guarantee future success.
  3. Intuitive Tools- A dog instinctively knows that it is time to go out. When it is time to go you will find your pet jumping. That is nature and we haven't managed to conquer this arena. Doing something instinctively is pretty unique with humans/animals that is hard to impart to tools. 
But a combination of these three tool building strategies can be awesome. Basically, there are somethings we are good at, like instincts and there are somethings machines are good at, like going through exhaustive set of data and learning. What if we come together and each one of us do what we are good at?

Hello, Collective Intelligence!!