Collective Intelligence
You could say it started in 1907, when the statistician Francis Galton recorded each of the guesses entered in a competition to guess the weight of an ox. Galton found that while any individual guesses might vary wildly, when considered in total the median value of the entries came within one percent of the ox's real weight. Galton published his findings, and the concept of a "collective intelligence" entered the popular imagination.
Simply stated, collective intelligence suggested that the average of a large number of individual responses could be astonishingly accurate. Considered intuitively, it made some sense. In the case of the ox, there were undoubtedly some respondents taking part in the contest who had some experience with livestock, or with weight estimation, and so could make relatively more accurate guesses of the ox's weight than someone without such experience. While less-sophisticated respondents might submit wildly erroneous guesses, those outlying values would largely cancel each other out when the total set of guesses were analyzed, leaving the number of more accurate guesses to create a meaningful average value.
During the 'TechBro' era, from 2020 to 2055, several start-ups were competing in a sort of arms race to try and find a technological method of leveraging the accuracy of collective intelligence in real-time. One such startup, Tactical Thought, convinced the US Army to let them wire sensors into the helmets of a large number of infantry soldiers with the goal of providing "real-time crowd-sourced evaluation of tactical decision-making." Tactical Thought began conducting trials of their technology with actual soldiers during war game simulations.
Unfortunately, the kinds of battlefield decisions that would have theoretically benefited from a collective intelligence approach were typically based on another kind of intelligence: Carefully collected and highly protected military intelligence. There was no way to present a tactical situation for evaluation without including the detailed information behind the scenario, and there was no way to provide those confidential details to several thousand grunts without also disclosing the manner in which they had been collected, and to what degree they had been vetted. The army was simply not willing to do this.
A solution to the security problem was provided by neurologist Dr. Sanjay Choudhary, a paid consultant for Tactical Thought. Dr. Choudhary developed a brilliant method of feeding the details of a given tactical scenario to the participating soldier at a level that was below conscious thought, somewhere between the subliminal and the subconscious. Analogously, the feedback from the participants was collected passively, without the need of the intent of the soldier, and with no conscious realization. The key to collecting the results was a new class of sensors that could detect what they termed the "temperature" of the participant's response to the scenario fed to them, ranging from cold (reflecting disapproval of the scenario), to hot (approval and enthusiasm). And best of all, from the perspective of the military brass, because the analysis was performed at a level below conscious thought, the participants were unable to provide a false response. There could be no intentional misleading, whether to avoid combat or in hopes of currying favor. What the system produced was the honest evaluation of the participant collective.
Initial trials of the Tactical Thought systems were very successful, and so the technology was quietly expanded to larger numbers of participants, and then eventually adopted for analyzing real world data from ongoing military operations. In a few short years the army was using tens of thousands of participants every day, feeding them scenarios that ranged from specific squad-level operations to broad theater-wide strategic plans. And, because the military population wired into the Tactical Thought system included large numbers of veterans, the resulting analyses reflected years of warfighting experience, and the accuracy of those responses swamped the less accurate and perhaps less realistic responses provided by less-experienced soldiers. Ultimately Tactical Thought was providing spectacularly high-value feedback to the army on a wide range of topics.
Given human nature, it was perhaps inevitable, but over time the Tactical Thought system was asked to evaluate some scenarios where the tactical objective was perhaps more political than strictly military. For example, an invasion plan under review might emphasize the recovery of certain assets held by US-affiliated corporations, but disregard the number of casualties suffered. And in those cases it was reluctantly reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that such operations were consistently being given a sub-zero temperature value.
Attempts were made to finesse the presentation of the scenarios, to obfuscate the more troublesome details, before feeding it into the collective minds of the soldiers. It didn't matter. There was then an attempt to use the Tactical Thought system with only a pre-selected subset of soldiers thought to be more 'compliant' in their thinking. It made no difference. Small populations resulted in erratic results, and if the sample set was large enough to provide a valid analysis, then there were necessarily enough members who understood in practical terms how war and politics intersected, and they couldn't be so readily fooled.
The brass got their biggest shock when such orders were given anyway, despite a negative analysis. In each case, when given orders that had been contraindicated by the collective analysis, every member of the Tactical Thought collective reacted incredibly negatively. Their reaction was not a conscious one, as after all none of the participants could have remembered the details of the scenario, or the collective result. At least not consciously. Nevertheless, the response was astoundingly bad, and ranged from poor morale, to acts of insubordination, and even to unheard of incidents of desertion.
Asked to provide an explanation, Dr. Choudhary theorized that as the members of the collective were being made to perform their analyses on a profoundly deep cognitive level, that the results of the analysis were essentially becoming internalized. Put more simplistically, if the collective had agreed that it was a bad plan, for whatever reason, any member of the collective that was tasked with carrying out that plan would suffer from what he called "cognitive friction."
However, by this point the military had been enjoying unprecedented successes made possible by Tactical Thought, and had become thoroughly dependent upon collective intelligence. No one was willing to go back to the old methods of strategic planning.
And so by 2060 US military forces had acquired a shining reputation for fighting prowess, battlefield success, honor, and professionalism that was the envy of the world. It would be several decades before the reasons behind this metamorphosis were eventually revealed.