On Extending Collective Intelligence

June 19, 2023 timothywstanley@me.com

Extending the collective intelligence of others was a practical solution, not an idealistic one. Atherton’s group observed that, because the new computer terminal locations at Syracuse were ‘remote from a reference librarian or any other human specialists in the user’s interest area’, they would need an additional source of help, which could be found in ‘the human intelligence of all other users of the system’... Atherton’s group saw that we would lose expert intermediaries; they designed for this cost. In 2022 and 2023, as the first generative AI search engines, including academic search engines such as Elicit and Consensus, were introduced to a wide set of users to both great excitement and scepticism, it is similarly useful to analyse what will be lost when researchers come to rely on these tools.

Monica Westin, “Ingenious Librarians,” https://aeon.co/essays/the-1970s-librarians-who-revolutionised-the-challenge-of-search. Extended mind theory has much to say about the theoretical modeling of our reliance upon others in search technologies.