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Geoff Mulgan: How Might Collective Intelligence Change Our World?
29:26

Geoff Mulgan: How Might Collective Intelligence Change Our World?

🌟 Welcome to a riveting episode of Spotlight Podcast, where we had the honour of hosting the exceptional Professor Geoff Mulgan! 🎙️ 👨‍💼 Biography of Professor Geoff Mulgan: Professor Mulgan, a distinguished British academic, author, and social entrepreneur, has pioneered social innovation and public policy. Born in 1961, he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) at the University of Oxford, laying the foundation for his impactful career. 🔗 Career Highlights: Geoff Mulgan's journey includes pivotal roles such as serving as the Chief Executive of the Young Foundation, a think tank and charitable organisation in the UK focused on social innovation. His influence extends to Government, where he served as the Director of the Government's Strategy Unit under Prime Minister Tony Blair, showcasing his commitment to positive societal change. Moreover, Professor Mulgan was the CEO of Nesta from 2011 until 2019. 📚 Authorship: Professor Mulgan is a prolific author, contributing significantly to the discourse on social innovation, public policy, and the future of society. Some of his notable books include "Good and Bad Power: The Ideals and Betrayals of Government" and "The Art of Public Strategy: Mobilising Power and Knowledge for the Common Good." Recent additions to his impressive bibliography include "BIG MIND: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World" (2017), "Another World is Possible: How to Reignite Radical Political Imagination" (2022), "Prophets at a Tangent: How Art Shapes Special Imagination?" (early 2023), and "When Science Meets Power" in November 2023. 🤝 Social Innovation Advocacy: Geoff Mulgan is a prominent advocate for social innovation, championing novel solutions to address societal challenges. His involvement in various organisations and initiatives reflects his dedication to implementing innovative approaches for positive change. 🏫 Academic Contributions: In addition to his impactful career in social innovation and public policy, Professor Mulgan has held academic positions at esteemed institutions, including University College London (UCL) and the London School of Economics (LSE), contributing to the intellectual discourse around societal evolution. 🔍 Podcast Episode Highlights: In this episode, we navigated various fascinating topics, delving into Professor Mulgan's insights on artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), collective intelligence, and social innovation. We explored the transformative potential of intelligent institutions and their impact on public policy. 💡 Intelligence, Smartness, and Wisdom: We embarked on a journey to simplify complex concepts, with Professor Mulgan explaining, as if to a seven-year-old, the differences between individual and collective intelligence. His ability to distil intricate ideas into digestible insights was genuinely enlightening. 🌐 AI in Governance: The conversation extended to the association of AI with policy in the realm of governance. Professor Mulgan shared his perspectives on the most associated word in the world of policy linked with AI, and we explored the nuanced connection between AI and ethics. 📊 Collective Intelligence and Governance: Drawing from Professor Mulgan's extensive work, we delved into the evolution of collective intelligence and its transformative potential. The episode touched upon intelligent institutions and their role in shaping effective public policy. 🔮 Future Perspectives: As we navigated through Professor Mulgan's recent releases, including "BIG MIND," we contemplated the retrospective impact of his work in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the unfolding Brexit circumstances. 🌟 Conclusion: This episode encapsulates the depth of Professor Geoff Mulgan's expertise, offering a panoramic view of his career, ideas, and contributions to the fields of social innovation and public policy. Join us in this enlightening exploration of intelligence, innovation, and the future of societal evolution. 🎧 Listen now and join the conversation on the future of collective intelligence, AI, and social innovation! 🎙About us: The mission of this regional educational podcast is to shine a light on the brilliant careers of students, entrepreneurs, researchers and inventors who create great things in the silence of their homes, away from the public eye. The goal of the Spotlight Podcast is cross-border cooperation and creating a platform for networking and strategic cooperation in all scientific fields. Also, with academic upgrading and international experience, we slowly and shyly start the topics of personal and professional development, encouraging proactivity and entrepreneurial spirit. In March 2022. we recorded the first episode, and since then, fortunately for us, with enthusiasm and satisfaction, we have only known success.
Creative Bureaucracy Festival meets Science: Interview Geoff Mulgan (English)
31:11

Creative Bureaucracy Festival meets Science: Interview Geoff Mulgan (English)

Governments around the world are ever more dependent on science and technology when making decisions. Yet while many countries have amazingly high quality science advice pouring into government, this knowledge often disappears into a black hole. Not only are processes not designed to synthesise and mobilise diverse sets of knowledge towards effective decision making, but public officials and politicians aren’t trained with the capacities needed to imagine things differently. What would it take to change that? How could governments embed collective intelligence organisation at their core? And how could we ensure a next generation of agile bureaucrats fluent in both synthesising complex evidence and dynamic speculative imagining? These are some of the questions tackled in this interview with Sir Geoff Mulgan. Currently professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London (UCL), Geoff draws on decades of experience moving between academia, government, business and the practicalities of how governments work to shed light on these questions and more. Follow the Creative Bureaucracy Festival -------------- Official Website: https://creativebureaucracy.org Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CreativeBureaucracyFestival Twitter: https://twitter.com/CreatBureauFest Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/creativebureaucracyfest/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/15837395/ About the Creative Bureaucracy Festival -------------- Every year over 1,000 international participants from government, politics, civil society and other change-making organisations join the Creative Bureaucracy Festival to share and celebrate outstanding examples of innovative public administrations. Under the headline “Creative Bureaucracy Festival Meets Science”, the festival joined the Berlin Science Week in 2022 and hosted daily digital conversations with leading experts on specific topics to take a closer look at the relationship between the public sector and science. Even in government there are excellent, creative solutions to almost all community issues - the Creative Bureaucracy Festival puts these solutions and the minds behind them in the limelight. The festival, according to its president Charles Landry, represents a shift from a "no because" culture to a "yes if" culture that embraces experimentation and new ideas. In doing so, the festival also aims to refresh the reputation of public administrations and attract imaginative new talent.
Geoff Mulgan – How Can Collective Intelligence Orchestrate Tacit Knowledge of Different Kinds?
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Geoff Mulgan – How Can Collective Intelligence Orchestrate Tacit Knowledge of Different Kinds?

Geoff Mulgan (CEO, National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) delivered this keynote lecture on 26 June 2019 at 'Tacit Engagement in the Digital Age' (www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28385). An earlier generation of work on collective intelligence focused primarily on aggregation of individual insights and inputs for citizen science, web projects such as Wikipedia and crowd-sourcing ideas. The key insights of more recent work on CI is that the combination of functional elements of intelligence (models, observation, creativity, memory, judgement etc) increases useful intelligence, especially when these feed into cycles of action and learning. This highlights the need in everyday intelligence for ways of combining formal and informal, codified and tacit, whether in the hospital, classroom or political decision-making. This requires tacit information and knowledge to become less tacit so that they can be shared, interrogated and combined. I will suggest some of the practical and theoretical dimensions of this: - A general thesis about the growth of roles involving mutual supervision of machines and expert humans, formal data and tacit judgement, which will have the effect of making human judgement more formal and self-aware - A thesis about tacit knowledge in innovation, prompted by current work with the UNDP (mapping and supporting positive deviants, grassroots innovations etc) - A thesis about skill and how people can represent experience and competence in ways very different to the formal definitions of CVs and qualifications; or the thin descriptions and feedback of Linkedin; how this may help with the discovery of latent potential (this links to the current Nesta programme of work on Open Jobs) - A thesis about democracy, and how knowledge can be connected to experiences and feelings (with vTaiwan as a live example) There is a long history of tension between standardised metrics and representations on the one hand, and on the other the diversity of lived experience, especially the poor and powerless. Formal knowledge is associated with external power. These examples may suggest new accommodations between formal and tacit, new ways to get below the surface of data, and to reconcile the internal and external.
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