Four development stages of collective intelligence

The new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) research initiated by Chinese scholars conforms to the needs of a new information environment changes, and strives to advance traditional artificial intelligence (AI 1.0) to a new stage of AI 2.0. As one of the important components of AI, collective intelligence (CI 1.0), i.e., swarm intelligence, is developing to the stage of CI 2.0 (crowd intelligence). Through in-depth analysis and informative argumentation, it is found that an incompatibility exists between CI 1.0 and CI 2.0. Therefore, CI 1.5 is introduced to build a bridge between the above two stages, which is based on bio-collaborative behavioral mimicry. CI 1.5 is the transition from CI 1.0 to CI 2.0, which contributes to the compatibility of the two stages. Then, a new interpretation of the meta-synthesis of wisdom proposed by Qian Xuesen is given. The meta-synthesis of wisdom, as an improvement of crowd intelligence, is an advanced stage of bionic intelligence, i.e., CI 3.0. It is pointed out that the dual-wheel drive of large language models and big data with deep uncertainty is an evolutionary path from CI 2.0 to CI 3.0, and some elaboration is made. As a result, we propose four development stages (CI 1.0, CI 1.5, CI 2.0, and CI 3.0), which form a complete framework for the development of CI. These different stages are progressively improved and have good compatibility. Due to the dominant role of cooperation in the development stages of CI, three types of cooperation in CI are discussed: indirect regulatory cooperation in lower organisms, direct communicative cooperation in higher organisms, and shared intention based collaboration in humans. Labor division is the main form of achieving cooperation and, for this reason, this paper investigates the relationship between the complexity of behavior and types of labor division. Finally, based on the overall understanding of the four development stages of CI, the future development direction and research issues of CI are explored.