Collective intelligence – a matter of collective accountability

These days, everyone seems to be into smart mobs, swarm intelligence and crowdsourcing – maybe it’s about time to remember that a “collective on autopilot can be a cruel moron”, as Andrian Kreye put it in an article on Sueddeutsche (in German). Colleague Tassilo Pellegrini also likes to emphasize that collectivity is not the end of the individual’s accountability, referring to Rafael Capurro who said that “in the light of the changed conditions of the distribution of power, the Semantic Web is a project on a global political scale; too important to be left to engineers or politicians.” This is my own meek translation of the much more elegant words Marion Fugléwicz-Bren found in her article Kollektive Intelligenz – nicht ohne individuelle Ethik (in German).