Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas - Day 1 at SFI
Soothing artwork in Santa Fe between all the intellectual conversations!
The entire series can be accessed here.
And so it begins …
Systems, put simply, are boundaries with constituents. Our world and our bodies are systems of systems, from cities to cells. The reason to study systems is to understand how the levels impact each other, what commonalities exist between them, and how interventions can be designed to target the right level.
“Identifying local, individual interactions is the key to understanding collective intelligence.”
On Day 1 with the Santa Fe Institute, I didn't find a solution – but I found a gold mine of insights that have left my head spinning and brilliant partners to push these ideas around with.
Top 3 insights
David Ha, Stability AI, talking about resilience and antifragility of systems.
1. Stigmergy: distributed decision-making for coordinated action
In biology, impressive group behaviors emerge almost spontaneously. Stigmergy describes the process of indirect coordination through the environment – and we learn that the key to understanding these impressive group results is looking at each individual's relationship to their immediate environmental context.
In wasps, each nest cell provides the design constraints needed to build it - with no other instructions. Schools of rummy nose tetras create dynamic shapes when individual fish respond to the actions of ~2 immediate neighbors.
2. How to support self-organization
For an environment to promote self-organizing behaviors, two things are required. Positive feedback promotes the creation of new structures, like the wasp building a new cell. But negative feedback is also important to counterbalance and stabilize the process so that unchecked creative effort doesn't compromise the function and continuity of the project.
3. Finding the fastest path
Collective intelligence (CI) functions like an optimization algorithm – it excels at finding the shortest path to reward. Consider ants finding a food source: ants who take the fastest route are quicker to return and share the good news with others, while those who got lost go radio silent. This feature of CI is both a blessing and a curse. It can work against you if the fastest path to an outcome, for example, bypasses important security protocols.
More giants!
Ted Chiang, highly acclaimed science fiction author: Ted has recently published thoughtful pieces on technology and society. "Will AI Become the Next McKinsey" is a must-read. It was great to sit down at a table and debate whether a generalizable "intelligence" can be identified in humans – and what problems exist in narrow, IQ-driven definitions. Ted and I will attend ALIFE 2023, the Conference on Artificial Life, in Sapporo, Japan, later this summer - where he is a headliner.
Julian Berger is a predoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute studying the intersections of human-AI interaction, collective intelligence, and social decision-making. Like me, he's optimistic about forecasting and prediction markets as ways for organizations to use CI to make more informed decisions about AI.
Ross Tieman's work is something we hope we never need! He studies how to rebuild food production in global catastrophes like nuclear winter and what low-hanging fruit (bad pun) leaders can grab now to make humanity more robust against crises.
Making new friends and diving deep into the day’s materials and food (both for thought and sustenance!)
The best part of being at Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas is the chance to meet people with grand ambition and moral courage who use rigorous analytical thinking to find the best levers to create a better future for humanity. That is the promise of CI - and AI - and is the driving force behind my life, what we describe as augmented collective intelligence (ACI).
Unforgettable sessions
Geoffrey West's "A Physics Perspective on Collective Intelligence," to me, was the most compelling picture of the beauty of science I've ever heard in person. He spoke about how all systems flow from optimization mechanisms, how cities are CI machines, and what first principles can (and can't) teach us about the systems we find ourselves in.
Geoff’s insights and spark for intellectual conversation is unmatched!
Historian and New York Times-bestselling author Andrea Wulf shared a portrait of an explosive period of growth driven by a small collective of interdisciplinary writers, philosophers, and scientists. Her book on the subject, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, is a reflection on the tension between independent thought and selfishness and how communities of thinkers can come together to argue, debate, and make outsized contributions to the cause of human flourishing.
Looking forward to …
Today, we began digging into the idea of intelligence – what it is, how it can be meaningfully measured, and what dangers emerge from an oversimplified definition. I look forward to hearing Melanie Mitchell and SFI president David Krakauer challenge my understanding and gain clarity on the core disagreements between leading minds in the field.
