Distributed intelligence

The history of the human race is one of increasing intellectual capability. Since the time of our early ancestors, our brains have gotten no bigger; nevertheless, there has been a steady accretion of new tools for intellectual work (including advanced visual interfaces) and an increasing distribution of complex activities among many minds. Despite this transcendence of human cognition beyond what is "inside" a person's head, most studies and frameworks on cognition have disregarded the social, physical, and artifactual surroundings in which cognition and human activity take place.Distributed intelligence provides an effective theoretical framework for understanding what humans can achieve and how artifacts and tools can be designed and evaluated to empower human beings and to change tasks.This paper presents and discusses the conceptual frameworks and systems that we have developed over the last decade to create effective socio-technical environments supporting distributed intelligence.