Between 2013 and 2016, Émile Servan-Schreiber’s short public updates placed collective intelligence in several settings: international risk discussions, economic-policy debate, the World Bank and a literary café. Read together, they show the range of audiences encountering the idea. They also distinguish three activities that are easily confused: discussing risks, ranking possible solutions and forecasting an outcome that can later be checked.
11 June 2013: A global-risks meeting in Geneva
Servan-Schreiber announced that he was heading to the World Economic Forum’s Advisory Meeting on Global Risks in Geneva. The Forum’s contemporary survey overview describes more than 1,000 experts considering risks over the next ten years. That supplies the wider programme context; his travel notice gives no agenda, formal appointment or account of his contribution.
30 September 2013: An invitation into the Kiel discussion
He next announced travel to Kiel, Germany, to participate in the Global Economic Symposium. The update identifies the institution and intended participation. It preserves no session title or speaking role, but establishes the starting point for two later invitations asking a wider public to help evaluate the symposium’s proposed solutions.
7 November 2013: Best and worst solutions
The first November invitation asked readers to visit a voting page and choose the best and worst solutions. Its subject was the evaluation of proposals. The archive does not preserve the options, the people who voted or the method for combining their judgements.
8 November 2013: A second call to rank proposals
The following day, Servan-Schreiber repeated the invitation, explicitly asking for help identifying solutions to the world’s problems. The two posts document outreach for the same exercise. They do not establish a final ranking or show that any institution acted on it. A ranking of proposals also supplies no dated probability of a particular event.
29 March 2014: A World Bank talk
In March 2014, he reported having just given a World Bank talk on collective intelligence and prediction markets at Bertrand Badré’s invitation. He identified Badré as managing director and chief financial officer, titles corroborated by the Bank’s own 2014 records. The talk’s exact day, examples and audience remain unspecified; no World Bank forecasting deployment follows from the speaking visit.
3 August 2014: A dinner conference on Belle-Île
An August invitation addressed people visiting Belle-Île and advertised a collective-intelligence dinner conference for 8 August. The attached photograph shows a Liber & Co bookshop notice with the same date and subject. This was a public literary setting for the idea, although the invitation and poster do not establish what was delivered that evening.
3 October 2016: Collective intelligence alongside AI and big data
In October 2016, Servan-Schreiber shared what he advertised as a thirty-minute explanation of collective intelligence. He placed it alongside artificial intelligence and big data as a third digital revolution, arguing that organised human intelligence could preserve a human advantage over machines. That was his thesis, with no probability, deadline or performance measure attached.
These notices trace public engagement rather than a scored forecasting record. The later Futuribles account of forecasting tools develops the practical distinction: collective judgement becomes testable forecasting when the question, horizon and eventual outcome are recorded.
