Mechanisms of Crowd Intelligence Emergence in Human Societies: from Collective Behaviors to Culture Evolution (Invited)

Crowd intelligence has been highlighted as one of the five major trend directions in China's New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, and the question ″How does crowd intelligence emerge?″ was listed by Science in 2021 among 125 key scientific challenges for the future. Existing studies on intelligence emergence have largely focused on collective intelligence in biological groups (e.g., flocks of birds and schools of fish), emphasizing how simple individuals following local interaction rules can give rise to globally ordered behaviors. By contrast, crowd intelligence in human societies involves not only behavioral coordination and organization but also higher-order intelligence and richer connotations manifested in knowledge, culture, and innovation. To address this discrepancy and research gap, this study, for the first time, systematically reviews and clarifies the conceptual framework and core connotations of crowd intelligence in human societies. It conducts an in-depth analysis of seven representative emergent phenomena—crowd behavior, wisdom of crowds, consensus formation, social cooperation, social learning, knowledge and culture, and collective intelligence innovation—by summarizing their key mechanisms, major models, driving factors, and evolutionary regularities, thereby constructing a theoretical system for the emergence of crowd intelligence in human societies. Building on this foundation, the study further investigates the mapping pathways and mechanisms from human crowd intelligence to artificial crowd intelligence; extracts representative paradigms and essential implementation essentials of mechanism-driven artificial crowd intelligence systems; and provides fundamental theoretical and methodological support for the design, construction, and future development of artificial crowd intelligence systems oriented toward complex tasks.