Symbiotic Intelligence

Computerworld - The Internet, so relentlessly hyped in the late 1990s, may actually be doing more to boost U.S. productivity than most people have imagined. Its unique ability to foster human interaction may prove to be a hidden catalyst for solving some of society's toughest problems.

Scientists have viewed evolution as a process of natural selection resulting from competition. But recently, some have argued that cooperation and symbiosis are really the dominant forces in nature.

An academic argument of no practical importance? No, says Norman Johnson, a computational physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Johnson, who leads the Symbiotic Intelligence Project at the lab, says an emerging understanding of how people interact in informal groups to solve complex problems may profoundly influence how we organize and manage corporations, how we hire and train people and what technology we equip them with.

Johnson argues that self-organizing groups of "average" people can solve complex problems better than experts can. Challenges today—such as managing a global economy, fighting terrorism or optimizing supply chain operations—are more complex and more distrib- uted than problems were 20 years ago, and so they are less amenable to top-down solutions by "experts," he says.

In a U.S. Department of Labor survey, employees at several large companies said that 70% of the information they need to perform their jobs comes from informal sources, not from training courses, manuals or instructions from their bosses. Computer networks, acting in symbiosis with groups of people, facilitate the flow of this informal information and help create knowledge, Johnson contends.

70% Employees at several large companies say 70% of the information they need to perform their jobs comes from informal sources.

Johnson says U.S. intelligence agencies invested heavily in IT in the 1990s, believing that tools such as data mining were the key to solving complex intelligence problems.

"But it was generally a failure," he says. "They were always surprised by events, when in hindsight, the danger and players were clear.

"What the intelligence community forgot—possibly even to this day—was that humans are the best processors of complex information," he says. "Only the combination of a human/computer symbiotic system can solve large problems of high complexity."