Smart Mobs - The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

Smart Mobs - The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold: "Scientists have viewed evolution as a process of natural selection resulting from competition. But recently, some have argued that cooperation and symbiosis are really the dominant forces in nature.
An academic argument of no practical importance? No, says Norman Johnson, a computational physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Johnson, who leads the Symbiotic Intelligence Project at the lab, says an emerging understanding of how people interact in informal groups to solve complex problems may profoundly influence how we organize and manage corporations, how we hire and train people and what technology we equip them with.
Johnson argues that self-organizing groups of 'average' people can solve complex problems better than experts can. Challenges today—such as managing a global economy, fighting terrorism or optimizing supply chain operations—are more complex and more distrib- uted than problems were 20 years ago, and so they are less amenable to top-down solutions by 'experts,' he says. "