Collective Intelligence is Antidisciplinarian
Gianni Giacomelli
Researcher | Consulting Advisor | Keynote | Chief Innovation / Learning Officer. AI to Transform People's Work and Products/Services through Skills, Knowledge, Collaboration Systems. AI Augmented Collective Intelligence.
Truly novel ideas typically start from the combination of our knowledge periphery, showing that the discipline-driven boundaries we create for ourselves are often our worst enemy. The Antidisciplinarian newsletter from Massimo Portincaso should be part of any #innovation professional information diet.
This month, I share my own thoughts as published in Antidisciplinarian, as well as Massimo's entire newsletter, to which I strongly encourage you to subscribe .
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Superminds. I am a big fan of?Gianni Giacomelli ’s work on?Collective Intelligence ?and am an avid reader of his?monthly newsletter , which I strongly recommend (you can subscribe?here ).
His thinking is completely aligned with the Antidisciplinarian one, and he kindly agreed to write a guest post for AD, here below. The views expressed are his, but I endorse them in their entirety!?
In my own Weltanschauung, Antidiscplinarity and Collective Intelligence go hand in hand… so you’ll hear more on the topic going forward…
From Gianni:
Innovation matters - from polycrisis to megathreats, to the increase of depression in our societies, gloom and doom seem to be pervasive these days - despite the world being awash with wealth, and technology.?
Olsen said that the problem with our societies is the hiatus between our paleolithic brains, our medieval institutions, and our godlike technology. But it also may very well be that we aren’t using our technologies to augment those paleolithic brains and those institutions.?
Some?think ?that?we might have hit an information-processing threshold?in our society, which prevents us from accelerating. I tend to agree - especially because we haven’t fully percolated the power of our digital technologies into our economies, which in turn can trigger exponential learning curves across many other technologies, particularly in deep tech.?
Among others, this state of affairs contributes to one big problem at hand:?The cycle of invention (idea successfully prototyped) to innovation-at-scale (widespread implementation of the new practices) typically takes decades. For climate change, we just?don’t have that time .?
Problems can’t be solved with the same level of intelligence that created them, quipped Einstein a century ago. And herein lies the massive opportunity. Digital technology can augment what MIT professor Tom Malone dubbed “superminds ”,?collective?intelligences that help networks of people and machines sense, remember, create, decide, act, and learn - at hyperscale. In doing so, they could help us crack hard problems, such as those in deep tech, that require an intelligent ecosystem to properly recombine fragments of solutions into cohesive ones.?
“The network is the computer”, we started saying almost 40 years ago. Now?the network, an AI-augmented and collective-intelligence powered one,?is the machine and the collective brain. It is the supermind and can help us?bridge ?the current innovation gap.?
Superminds are all around us already. From social media networks to blockchain and modern financial trading markets, from Wikipedia to Google Search to PatientsLikeMe, from Linux to Gitcoin and Bellingcat, from Taiwan’s use of Pol.is to Citizen Assemblies and OpenStreetMap, from drone swarms to Ukraine’s decentralized defense networks, from manufacturing giant Haier to hedge-fund Bridgewater to enterprises using Microsoft Viva Topics, and obviously, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, bits of superminds are being harnessed already. (Almost 900 examples of them and their components, big and small, are?here .)
Elsewhere (here ?and?here ) I talk about how AI natural language models, knowledge-graph tech, and generally data science have prompted a revolution in knowledge management and collaboration technology, as well as our learning and development practices. They all amplify superminds.?
As an example:?Our world routinely throws away or ignores the knowledge we create. You can see it in your own daily work, and the work of your organizations: every day, we reinvent wheels, and we don’t access the right people (or organizations) at the right time to find (or remember) solutions.?The world creates an astonishing amount of data — and knowledge — and makes it available online. It connects people in incredible ways that would have felt like sci-fi at the turn of the millennium.?
And yet, our search engines and our social media are not made for combinatorial innovation - they’re made for spinning ads.?Much knowledge, especially publicly-funded research, still sits behind paywalls, preventing deep mapping and access. As a result,?we collectively don’t learn enough from the experiments made elsewhere.?
Sadly, our management practices reflect the issue: strategic knowledge creation and management isn’t a C-suite role, and that job is often fragmented across departments — domain practice groups, the CIO, sales support, etc. which weakens the much-needed enterprise transformation. Across even broader ecosystems, incentive systems are still broken, as attested by academia’s struggles to give appropriate credit and encourage more creative exploration.?
All of this results?in an unnecessary “supermind lobotomy”, without doing much to mitigate the real risks posed by improper uses of our godlike technology. Another world is possible though - and I shared some stories of a possible future based on augmented collective intelligence (ACI)?here .
One of the reasons why we are collectively stuck is that we tend to think in traditional disciplines, and, at best,?across traditional?disciplines. That’s why being antidisciplinary is so important.?We need to probably create a new?discipline , that starts from innovation as the proverbial Y, and solves for it by pulling from other disciplines but also complementing them with what I call “design of superminds”.?A discipline for augmentation of collective intelligence, that sits across AI, other digital technologies such as knowledge graph, but also learning and development, organizational and process design, and HR. And of course, connected with deep domain expertise, for instance in synbio or renewable energies.?
Let’s harness augmented collective intelligence instead of stale organizational and technology design. We need tomorrow’s intelligence to solve tomorrow’s problems.?Let’s go build superminds.
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“VCs are waking up to the fact” that the solution to climate change can’t be reached “with software alone.” Instead, infrastructure startups that build “big physical stuff” used in nuclear fusion and?carbon capture ?tech are essential to combating the “climate crisis.”
Will Dufton, Principal at OMERS Ventures, says, “The constituent issues of the climate crisis are physical problems that demand physical solutions. It is not hard to imagine a world in which billions of dollars of value is captured by many climate technology companies.”
News items:
The market for consumer 3D printers never really materialized, but “additive manufacturing” is increasingly being used for everything from?building homes ?to Rolls Royces. The 3D printing market is forecast to “almost triple in size” to $44.5B by 2026.
AI re-creations of images based on brain scans (bottom row) match the layout, perspective, and contents of the actual photos seen by study participants (top row).
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A?recent study ?shows that, when it comes to images, at least, AI can read your mind. A modified version of?Stable Diffusion ?that “incorporates textual and visual information to ‘decipher the brain’” is able to able to analyze “brain activity patterns” and generate “image[s] depicting the contents, layout, and perspective of the photo being viewed.”
Using a?data set ?of “brain scans from four participants as they each viewed a set of 10,000 photos,” coupled with “keywords from image captions,” Stable Diffusion was able to create “a convincing imitation of the real photo” participants had seen.
News items:
With GPT-4’s launch behind us, multi-modality materialized, as anticipated by Microsoft Germany CTO?Andreas Braun , by allowing “users [to] turn text into video.” We’ll have more on GPT-4, what it means and multi-modal mode in the next issue of the AD.
Startup Retro Biosciences promises to?add 10 years to the average human life span ?in its “aggressive mission” to stall or reverse aging. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is a believer, singlehandedly seeding the company with $180M of his own money.
Altman claims to have “emptied his bank account” on Retro and fusion power startup?Helion Energy ?by investing approximately $555M in the two startups.
“It’s a lot. I basically just took all my liquid net worth and put it into these two companies,” Altman says.
News items:
Relativity Space ?creates rockets using 3D printers and hopes to?beat SpaceX to Mars ?by 2024. Its Terran 1 rocket is set to launch soon and, if successful, will be “the world's first almost entirely 3D printed rocket to reach orbit.”
Next time you check in to an?Aiden by Best Western ?“boutique hotel” in Scandinavia, the receptionist may be a hologram.?Holoconnects ?has developed a holographic human substitute for front desk duties such as welcoming guests and providing “pre-recorded information about the hotel.”
Thomas Furulund , Operations Manager at?CIC Hospitality , says, “Our main target is to have no administration tasks at the hotels. For customer satisfaction but also to operate our hotel more cost-efficiently, Our on-site staff should basically play shuffleboard and drink coffee with our guests instead of doing the traditional tasks.”
News items:
Holographic heads-up display (HUD) startup Envisics recently raised $50M in funding. CEO and Founder?Jamieson Christmas ?said, “Our next-generation technology unlocks much more of the holographic potential. We really are on the path to delivering that Star Wars vision of the world, with [in-car] 3D volumetric experiences.”
Aside from the “ethical and social implications” of genome-edited “CRISPR babies,” many?technical challenges ?still remain. A recent summit ?concluded that “Heritable human genome editing remains unacceptable at this time. Preclinical evidence for the safety and efficacy of heritable human genome editing has not been established, nor has societal discussion and policy debate been concluded.”
News items:
Since its February ‘23 release, the?Bold Glamour ?TikTok filter has been used over?16M times , and?“people are freaking out” ?about the?“rapid narrowing of beauty standards” ?that?prioritizes whiteness ?and thinness.