Personal Intelligence
My Safari Bookshelf currently has two books on Collective Intelligence. They are not theoretical books, but practical programming guides. One is titled “Collective Intelligence in Action”, the other “Programming for Collective Intelligence”. Sofar I had nurtured an almost philosophical interest for CI, but these books promise much more: I can get in front of my computer and start taking advantage of it. It is becoming a resource, maybe even a new kind of utility.
Personal Intelligence is another beast. It is this most precious – and unevenly distributed, capacity of knowing oneself and others in order to make sensible decisions in life. More so even than CI, PI has deep echoes in the philosophical tradition (everyone remembers Socrates’ motto). O’Reilly does have a few books that relate to PI, but they are not programming titles.
Thus, there seems to be no way for me to leverage Personal Intelligence insights and concepts using a computer. The idea might sound idiotic, but think about it: people (you?) generate tons of highly personal information on computers these days. Imagine what Freud could do if he could lay a hand on the accumulated data you are generating on all your electronic devices. Having you lay down on a sofa would probably feel redundant.
Organizations have exercised introspection for a long time, though. In the corporate world, this is known as Business Intelligence. Techniques in these disciplines have been inspired, or directly applied, from the fields of A.I. and bioinformatics. It is a vibrant field where techniques stemming from the 70s and 80s and that have been deemed useless ever since, have finally found their target domain; what’s more, they very effectively benefit the bottom line. It is basically this technology that is being rebranded and explained in simple words in my Safari books on Collective Intelligence.
Individuals could probably benefit from these techniques, too. Through mining their own data, you and I could find out about the cycles in our lives, uncover unforeseen influences from people and events. By knowing ourselves better we could certainly gain more control over our health, personal objectives and behavioral patterns.