Artificial Intelligence and Collective Intelligence

The vision of artificial intelligence (AI) is often mani-fested through an autonomous software module (agent) in a complex and uncertain environment. The agent is capa-ble of thinking ahead and acting for long periods of time in accordance with its goals/objectives. It is also capable of learning and refining its understanding of the world. The agent may accomplish this based on its own experience, or from the feedback provided by humans. Famous recent ex-amples include self-driving cars (Thrun 2006) and the IBM Jeopardy player Watson (Ferrucci et al. 2010). This chapter explores the immense value of AI techniques for collective intelligence, including ways to make interactions between large numbers of humans more efficient. By defining collective intelligence as “groups of individ-uals acting collectively in an intelligent manner, ” one soo