General Collective Intelligence and the Cloud

Abstract

The resources that can be made available on-demand through cloud computing are continually increasing. One potential addition is General Collective Intelligence or GCI, which has been defined as a platform that combines individuals into a single intelligence with the potential for exponentially greater general problem-solving ability (intelligence) than any individual. The concept of a cognitive computing platform involves leveraging GCI to orchestrate cooperation between any entities that are required in order to create the capacity to maximize any collective outcome targeted. Rather than executing programming code, a cognitive computing platform must execute functional models in which each of the functional operations composing that model is implemented in some programming language. All services that run on the cloud, as well as the cloud itself, can potentially be offered as cognitive computing platforms. Where current cloud computing limits customers to a particular cloud service vendor, cloud computing as a cognitive computing platform has the potential to completely decouple users from any such dependencies, while at the same time creating the potential for an exponential increase in demand for cloud services from those vendors that participate by decoupling their services in this way.