RedHerring about this interesting fact:

How many management fads have their origins in science fiction or mysticism? There's at least one: the notion of collective intelligence, a good idea that has some very weird origins.(...) A few aisles over in science fiction, you can find a second notion of collective intelligence. This one envisions an actual autonomous intelligence that arises (through some mysterious process) within computer networks, just as individual consciousness arises (through some mysterious process) from neurons. Think of the consciousness that speaks to Case at the end of William Gibson's Neuromancer, or the voodoo deities that haunt the Net in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.