This article makes so many points that are relevant to me.

As someone who’s worked in project teams my whole working life, the idea that collective intelligence is more important than individual intelligence resonates with me strongly. In a typical project team, there’s no one “hero” who can legitimately claim all or most of the credit. What’s more, no one person, no matter how long they worked, could possibly achieve what the team achieved.

Then there’s optimism. The person being interviewed here makes the excellent point that good news is gradual while bad news is sudden, so bad news tends to be what we notice. But with a consistent history of things improving, why are we convinced that they’re going to get worse? (That’s not to say that some things in particular will not get worse, but things in general tend to improve.)

Culture and society provide a kind of “ratchet effect” which mean that, on the whole, we build on what the people who came before us made. That’s why I’m typing this on a computer that’s the size of a large (but not thick) book and sending it out to people all over the world. Once we collectively solve a problem and encapsulate the solution in technology (or culture), we don’t have to solve that problem again; we can use the solution to solve the next problem.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Collective Intelligence Is the Root of Human Progress http://suhub.co/2ymMZtI