Welcome to the Age of Collective Intelligence

“Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.” - Zhuang Zhou

Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste

As we close out 2022 and enter 2023, let’s agree that the last few years have been rocky. Humanity is confronting multiple crises: disease, war, rampant disinformation, crumbling institutions and, not least, a climate crisis already making it harder to live on our home planet. You might not be surprised then that four-in-ten U.S. adults believe humanity is ‘living in the end times.’ You may have even wondered it yourself!

Well, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is you are not making it up - the world has indeed turned upside down. These interlocking crises are symptoms of a more profound Evolutionary Crisis that threatens our very existence as a species. The good news? We’ve been here before and, if we show up to this moment, we can take ourselves and those that follow one notch higher in the evolutionary ladder. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

We are the inheritors of four billion years of evolutionary gifts – gifts that have been hard won and birthed from crisis. Standing up on our hind legs wasn’t an act of willful defiance, it was an act of desperation as a changing climate (sound familiar?) forced us out of trees and onto predators-packed savannahs. We didn’t start farming because we liked it but because there was no other way to eat as we began crowding each other out of our planetary Eden. We don’t change out of desire but out of necessity… and nothing creates necessity like crisis.

Though existential at the time, each of these crises left us tremendous gifts. Walking on two legs freed up our hands to craft and use tools. Agriculture laid the foundation for organized society. So we can ask ourselves, what gifts might today’s Crisis hold? While the precise nature of these gifts will elude us for some time, we can trace their contours by observing new evolutionary pressures and how we are being called to overcome them.

Collective Action in the Anthropocene

In the new Anthropocene, humanity has become the dominant influence on the planet and its ecosystems. We are our own greatest threat. Of course, humans have threatened each other since time immemorial – the difference today is the degree and scale of our interconnectedness. No corner of the world can escape human-induced Climate Change, diseases like Covid-19, or the wide-reaching social and economic impacts of War. Whether we like it or not, we are getting clear evolutionary signals that “we win, or lose, together.”

At the same time, our old ways don’t seem up to the challenge of planetary-scale coordination. Self-interested nation-states have been slow to react to threats like climate change.  And unfortunately, emissions and natural disasters don’t stop at border crossings. While self-interested corporations have made tremendous strides in decarbonizing our economy, we are still on track to experience the most catastrophic effects of climate change. If we’re going to overcome global pandemics like Covid-19, it won’t be enough to coordinate a few hundred or thousand shareholders. We actually need to coordinate the majority of humanity, that is billions of people, around a shared goal. Corporations are not yet up to this challenge.

So what kind of evolutionary gift is waiting on the other side of today’s Crisis? A world-spanning, global government able to dictate humanity’s everyday choices? A fully decentralized, market-driven utopia where autonomous individuals can freely act in the best interests of society? Neither. Or, both, depending on your perspective. A true evolutionary leap won’t swing between the historical poles of individualism and collectivism but will synthesize their best ideas and create something new entirely.

The Rise of Collective Intelligence

While rising to this occasion will require a host of innovations and adaptations, I believe one of the most exciting promising frontiers is Collective Intelligence. This emerging field studies how people can work together to solve problems in a way that is more effective than any individual could do on their own. Collective intelligence is often associated with the idea of the "wisdom of the crowd" and can be seen in juries, elections, and, more recently, online crowdsourcing applications. Now, developments at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Blockchains, and Distributed Ledgers are making a “Global Brain” a reality.

This is not just a theoretical concept. In the past few years, we have seen the emergence of powerful collective intelligences that are already making an impact on our world. The OpenAI language model GPT-3, an “artificial intelligence” trained on humanity’s web-based memory, is already able to generate human-like text and perform a wide range of natural language tasks. At the same time, in just over ten years, millions of people around the world have collectively built and supported a global supercomputer to secure the Bitcoin cryptocurrency that, by some estimates, is over 100x more powerful than all of Google.

Today, the AI and blockchain communities are largely siloed and even rivalorous. However, the most promising opportunities lie at the intersection of these two burgeoning technologies. Distributed ledgers will effectively organize and incentivize the contributions of millions or even billions of people. Artificial Intelligence will synthesize and make sense of these contributions to guide us in real time. I predict that systems that effectively marry the principles and AI and blockchains will be the first to achieve a Collective Intelligence breakthrough.

Parting Thoughts

For most of the decade I’ve spent studying Collective Intelligence, the concept of a "hive mind" has been largely the stuff of science fiction. With recent advancements, we are already combining the knowledge and wisdom of millions of individuals and creating intelligent entities that will solve problems and make decisions at a speed and scale that far exceeds that of any individual human. As this trend continues, Collective Intelligence will extend well beyond language processing to tackle some of humanity's biggest challenges, from curing diseases and addressing climate change, to improving education, and ending poverty.

To be sure, Collective Intelligence is not utopia. The journey ahead will be hard. Already, our deepening interconnectedness and “always-on” society are challenging our privacy, attention, and our very idea of what it means to be human. The rise of Collective Intelligence will require both technological and social adaptation. Being part of a collective intelligence calls on us to see ourselves differently – not as atomized individuals or a monolithinc Borg but as free yet connected members of something far larger than ourselves.

So, welcome to the age of collective intelligence. It is a terrifying and exciting time to be alive. If I’m right, our hardest days lie ahead of us. Still, I remain optimistic that if we rise to the moment, we will leave a tremendous legacy for those that come after us.

Note: This article was produced with the help of ChatGPT.