Augmented Collective Intelligence - December Newsletter

Here's the fourth newsletter (previous ones here) that curates news and stories through the lens of?technologically augmented collective intelligence (from the CollectiveIntelligence.media website).

A couple of highlights from this month's crop: humans and borgs; helping climate innovation with better knowledge commons; investors' blind spot; more on Russia-Ukraine; on the physics and mathematics of collective intelligence; shrinking brains (in ants, and us), and importing skills; reputation laundering; and lots more.

If you're interested in using collective intelligence for inspiring your design of future-oriented solutions, I recommend browsing through the Futures 2030 collection here.

Enjoy - and share!

Innovation

?? Will Humans-In-The-Loop Become Borgs? Merits and Pitfalls of Working With AI Does AI impair human knowledge? Does it worsen individual and group decisions? There’s a strand of #collective-intelligence research that looks into that, and it is core to understanding the value of digitally augmented collective intelligence.

?? Cut Climate Tech Invention-To-Innovation Time The cycle of invention (successful prototype) to innovation at scale (widespread implementation) takes decades. For climate tech, we don't have that time. Yet, we can intentionally compress it through augmented collective intelligence.

?? Grading AI: The Hits and Misses Worth listening to the podcast for a couple of connections with collective intelligence. A) the need for “common sense” for the development of AGI - common sense is a sort of socially mediated mechanism (b) the concept of embodiment that once more requires the interaction with an environment (parts of which have individual intelligence). The resultant is a level of intelligence that is higher or at least different from the individual intelligences. I have my impression that the future of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is linked with ACI (augmented collective intelligence).

?? Advancing mathematics by guiding human intuition with AI Humans and AI working together can reveal new areas of mathematics where data sets are too large to be comprehended by mathematicians.

Future of Work

?? ???? You’re Overlooking a Source of Diversity: Age Inter-generational collaboration In the workplace is a key to collective intelligence.

?? Break Down Silos And Improve Productivity With These Emerging AI Technologies A good reminder of where collective intelligence can be unlocked in operational processes within an enterprise. Starting with experience design.

?? Investors Are Terrible at Forecasting Wars Markets’ collective intelligence tends to fail in “black swan” events. Low probability, high-impact outcomes aren’t well anticipated by financial investors and their instrumentation.

?? Importing Knowledge Research shows that immigration flows enable network structures conducive to collective intelligence and innovation.

?? Launching the Agent-Based Model for Teamwork Agent-based models can give us organizational ideas.

Society and politics

?? Hundreds of AI Tools Have Been Built to Catch COVID. None of Them Helped. A good example of exponential tech that delivers underwhelming results when used in non-collectively-intelligent ways. (A) domain experts didn't get sufficiently included by the data science (and especially data engineering) teams (b) incentives to publish in isolation, instead of validating or disproving other models

?? The Russian Hierarchy vs. The Ukrainian Network Different organizational structures show their strength and weaknesses in armed conflict.

??? Jakarta’s Transit Miracle Jakarta has seen a radical transformation of its public transport since 2010, which has greatly improved traffic conditions. Key leverage points in this change have been (a) making the transport modes more interoperable (e.g. through integrated maps and payments) and (b) shifting incentives for private transportation providers from fee-per-passenger to fee-per-kilometer which made driving safer. Additionally, cycling lanes were improved, making the system more holistically usable. In collective-intelligence parlance, this is a better architecture connection between parts of the network coupled with better incentives (payment structure for providers, and user experience for passengers).

?? It Takes a Network For those who want to see parallels between conflicts and how networks win/lose them, check this out. Ukraine isn’t Afghanistan, but networks have properties that often make them punch way above their weight against more hierarchical systems (especially from a resilience standpoint).

????♀? 15 Tips for Investigating War Crimes For an in-depth look at a different type of intelligence - OSINT and investigative journalism.

?? States, Institutions, and Literacy Rates in Early-Modern Western Europe Historical formation of collective intelligence: 16th century England, Netherlands market-economy networks boosted incentives for education, which drove investment in learning institutions, and paved the way to modern political institutions.

?? Exposed Documents Reveal How the Powerful Clean Up Their Digital Past Using a Reputation Laundering Firm This is the collective-intelligence equivalent of erasing memories in a brain - for private interest. Worrying - because one of the barriers to malfeasance is public reputation, and the web has traditionally been a comparatively good system of records.

Collective Intelligence's big picture

?? What Are Superminds, and How to Build Them (Video) Innovation doesn't just come from our individual brains. Explore the principles of networks' intelligence, both in nature and in human environments. And discover the four pillars that make it possible, with practical examples.

?? Planarian Regeneration as a Model of Anatomical Homeostasis Collective intelligence in cells through DNA takes a very surprising meaning in planarian flatworms. Their body can regenerate after damage, and the regenerated limb has more suited properties for the new environment. Also, their memory is embodied, so they can regenerate the brain too.

?? Skepticism vs Dogma Beautiful piece of logics and mathematics - and inspiring us to think that all sorts of networks can generate adaptive responses amounting to the intelligence needed for survival. Think of this - the laws of thermodynamics indicate that any sustainable energy system must have some level of energy control, or else it wouldn’t persist in the face of external variation…is that intelligence? Well, logically it is - the collective intelligence of that energy system.

?? When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants Good paper on the theory that brain size relates to the collective intelligence of large groups. Starting from the observation that in humans, brains shrank in the last 3000 years. This paper uses ants as proximate (ants' collective intelligence is well-researched). The idea is that if brain operation is metabolically expensive, and colonies of subjects perform well, then evolution privileges large groups of relatively smaller-brained animals. The paper doesn’t explicitly address the composition of the brain though - collective intelligence benefits from social awareness that in human brains is helped by the prefrontal cortex, which may be growing in importance in such collective cognitive architecture.

See you in a few weeks. Please?do share this newsletter?with anyone who could benefit from it!

In the meanwhile, for more new things, you can visit the?website?or follow us on?Twitter. And if you want to design and build an augmented collective intelligence for your organization, visit the?Supermind Design website?and especially the?new version of the?database, with hundreds of real-life examples.

With thanks to?Exponential View's members for their contribution to spotting some of these articles.