On the Notion of Collective Intelligence: Opportunity or Challenge?

1. On The Definition Of Collective Intelligence

According to a definition in Wikipedia “Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. Collective intelligence appears in a wide variety of forms of consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans, and computer networks - a field that studies collective behaviourfrom the level of quarks to the level of bacterial, plant, animal, and human societies.”

Occasionally, the term Collective Intelligence appears to be a synonym of Swarm Intelligence, Group IQ, Symbiotic Intelligence. Our quest in Oxford English Dictionary, however, returns no entry for the term Collective Intelligence. Instead, terms like Central Intelligence Agency, Military Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, SETI, Secret Intelligence Service, Nous and Intelligent Quotient are prompted as potential candidates of an answer to our quest.