Spotlight Issue 5: Collective Intelligence Project
A newsletter spotlighting individuals, organizations, and projects at the frontier
The Collective Intelligence Project (CIP) is an incubator for new governance models for transformative technology, primarily working to accomplish this goal through research, experimentation, and ecosystem-building.
CIP will focus on the research and development of collective intelligence capabilities: decision-making technologies, processes, and institutions that expand a group’s capacity to construct and cooperate towards shared goals. We will apply these capabilities to transformative technology: technological advances with a high likelihood of significantly altering our society.
Collective intelligence (CI) is how we set and execute on collective priorities. Innovations in CI systems, like capitalist markets or nation-state democracy, have shaped the modern world. As collective problems become more complex, our CI systems have too: global governance institutions and transnational corporations, standards-setting organizations and judicial courts, the decision structures of universities, startups, and nonprofits. These have allowed us to build incredible things. But they have also failed us. Rigid democratic institutions fail to serve their constituents or coordinate to solve global crises. Market mechanisms flatten complex values in favor of over-optimizing for cost, profit, or share price. Our most pressing challenges are fundamentally collective intelligence challenges: pandemics, climate change, plutocracy, and catastrophic risks from technology all require better ways to set and execute on priorities.
These failures are most evident when we apply existing CI systems to accelerating technological capacities. We have made little progress on regulating decades-old social media platforms, and we can barely talk about the dramatic resourcing shifts necessary to address growing climate risks. But new risks and opportunities continue to arise: we are faced with powerful AI models, blockchain-based financial and social technologies, expanded bioengineering capabilities, and large-scale labor automation. Directing technological development towards good outcomes requires working on the processes and institutions that drive effective decision-making around transformative technology. CIP is a response to the inevitable need for innovation brought about by the problems that existing CI systems could not solve.
At CIP, our core belief is this: Humans created our current CI systems to help achieve collective goals. We can remake them.
Here is what that means in practice. First, we need new models of value elicitation: ways to develop scalable processes for surfacing and combining group beliefs, goals, values, and preferences. Discussions of democratizing technological development abound, but they often leave aside the core question of actual collective input. Nation-state models of voting and representation are crude approximations of collective values and are ill-suited as inputs to technological development. We will accelerate promising alternatives. Currently, we are testing the use of liquid democracy for creating more values-aligned recommender systems; augmenting the emerging discussion platform SpeakEasy with language model capabilities, and supporting consortia-based efforts from complementary projects such as Pol.is, Talk to the City, the Consilience Project, RadicalXChange, and New Public.
Second, we must remake technology institutions. It is not enough merely to understand collective values. We must be able to execute on collective values. This requires developing hybrid philanthropic, public, and private funding models for technology development beyond the existing options of non-profit, VC-funded startup, or academic project. Our first pilot will be the ‘CI Corporation’: a scalable, capped-returns model for technology development and deployment. This builds from our past work on developing data intermediary institutions, frameworks for decentralized governance and metagovernance, internet standards-setting, and pandemic prevention consortia.
In the grand sweep of human history, it is highly unlikely that we’ve already somehow landed on the best ways to make collective decisions for the collective good. Transformative technologies give rise to new problems, and our collective intelligence must evolve to solve them. Our aim is to accelerate this necessary evolution by catalyzing an ecosystem of aligned governance research and development projects.