COGNITIVE LEAPS AND BOUNDS
As we look to embed artificial intelligence in the process of work, an interesting question arises. How will this evolution affect us? What does, or what could, the human-AI symbiosis look like in terms of the workplace and how will it change our own human cognition. Organizations that are already considering the future shape of human-AI systems and processes and how each will affect the other, will be best placed to realize productivity gains or maximize the impact of their investments in artificial AND human intelligence. This leads us into a discussion about the emergence of ‘collective intelligence’.
TOWARD COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
Collective intelligence is an example of a complex adaptive system, defined within organizational psychology as ‘groups of individuals capable of acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent and that cannot be explained by individual intelligence’. The individuals within this system see themselves as autonomous, but at the same time actively participate in ‘the collective’ as what organizational psychologists refer to as “interacting agents”. The interaction between these agents gives the collective an intelligence that cannot be explained by the aggregation of individual intelligences – the very process of interaction adds something to the aggregate. Collective intelligence is therefore an emergent phenomenon arising from the synergies between different skill sets or mental models etc.
“Good music comes out of people playing together, knowing what they want to do and going for it” Keith Richards
By collaborating and working together the collective achieves a level of ‘super-intelligence’ or capability that surpasses the abilities of any single group member. The salons, clubs and societies that were so beloved by polymaths are a form of collective intelligence and it was the ‘mind-expanding’ promise and enhanced problem-solving capability that drew them in, with dialogue facilitated through in-person, face-to-face interaction. The discussion was bounded by human cognitive intelligence. In the 21st century, and with the advent of technology, and latterly machine learning, human intelligence can now be augmented with artificial intelligence in a human-computer hybrid system - an integrative framework that combines both human and computer-based intelligence to achieve even greater synergies – leveraging the human based skills and human EQ with the power of AI.
Anthropologist Professor Matthew O’Lemmon (2020)[1] developed the idea of a ‘soft singularity’ to describe “the impact AI is having on the increase in speed of communication, rates of connectivity and time spent online, all of which have hastened the convergence to a collective consciousness”. By closing the cognitive gap between individuals and perhaps levelling the playing field via access and dissemination of information, artificial intelligence as just the latest in a long line of information technologies that have pushed us toward some form of collective consciousness.
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE AND OUR OWN EVOLUTION
AI will change the way we think, and the way that we need to think, as we learn how best to interact with it, and also how to absorb the information it presents us. And this is not new … artificial intelligence is just the latest technology that has shaped our individual and collective consciousness – from the earliest 40,000-year-old Upper Paleolithic cave paintings, through the written word, the printing press, phone, fax and email to latest internet enabled social media – technology has influenced how we interact with and process information. The question is … looking forward, how are we going to evolve as a result of these latest powerful information technologies?
“The outsourcing of information management to AI – […] comes with consequences. It can influence not only what we think, but potentially also how we think” (Bentley, Mason & Grimberg 2023). And we know that the capabilities of the latest AI models do a lot more than catalogue and present search results. These models can locate, evaluate, synthesize, structure and present information – which feels objective, and that apes knowledge and insight. How will our own cognitive processes react to this? Does this change the balance between our own internal sense-making, what we introspectively feel about something, and the tsunami of external cues that technology provides that requires far more acute extrospection skills.
As more data, information, knowledge and insight becomes available to us, it is interesting to consider how the balance of our ‘sensors-in-the-ground’ may alter. As we become more ‘collective’ we may be placing greater weight on external rather than internal cues, more emphasis on extrospection - the observation of things external to one's own mind - than introspection. And just by its very nature … collective intelligence will require us to all become more extrospective than introspective, as so much more will come from the collective than from within.
“It may be very difficult to understand what happens on the other side once we have a global connection of 7 billion people and 7 trillion machines and AIs all connected together, that there may be things happen at that level that we are not even aware of or can’t even be aware of.” Kevin Kelly, Founding Executive Editor, Wired Magazine
The available feedback from these sensors has been growing and expanding for a very long time, and the pace of this change is quickening. And as our context and environment change, then naturally we will continue to evolve. And we are designed to evolve – the brain never stops changing in response to learning, experience or memory formation[2]. The term for this ongoing development is ‘neural plasticity’, a process that involves adaptive structural and functional changes to the brain. “[Neural plasticity] is the ability of the nervous system to change its activity in response to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli, by re-organizing its structure, functions or connections”. (Mateos-Aparicio P, Rodríguez-Moreno A 2019)[3]
THE SUPERMIND
We have long stressed the importance of polymathic thinking as an antidote to the kind of hyper-specialization that will leave us vulnerable to the inexorable rise of artificial intelligence. Human intelligence applied to understanding the ‘interconnectedness’ of ideas, concepts and disciplines. The polymaths who came together in the salons and clubs to share and express their views were demonstrating the power of cognitive diversity – building upon or connecting into other polymaths areas of knowledge in a two plus two equals five scenario. But can we replicate the cognitive power of these salons in today’s businesses – enabling human intelligence to develop alongside artificial intelligence? Are there parallels or lessons to be learnt from forms of collective intelligence?
Futurist Don Tapscott describes four principles for an open world: collaboration, transparency (the communication of pertinent information), sharing (of ones own knowledge) and empowerment (the distribution of knowledge which empowers oneself and others). In their book ‘Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything’[4], Tapscott and fellow author Anthony Williams, describe their ‘Ideagora’ as a type of online community or “marketplace for minds” – that allow organizations to tap into the collective knowledge and a wide community. ‘Ideagora’ from “agora,” an ancient Greek marketplace or forum, with the addition of “idea” making it a marketplace or forum for ideas and innovation.
Marvin Minsky encouraged us to think in terms of a ‘society of mind’. This cognitive system is a vast society of individually simple processes that he also termed agents. These processes are the fundamental thinking entities from which collective intelligence is built - with different agents based on different types of processes with different purposes, ways of representing knowledge, and methods for producing results.
“What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle” Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
In the early 1980s Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich, Bruno Latour and John Law had developed what John Law later termed Actor-Network Theory which sees objects, ideas, processes etc. as just as important in creating social situations as humans (all can be termed actors). Somewhat controversial at the time, it does have parallels in more recent research that humans and machines are (or will become) inseparable, all playing roles in thinking networks.
In his book ‘Superminds’, Thomas Malone - the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence - outlines the potential power of intelligence exhibited by groups of people and computers working together in a hybrid model. Malone argues that “instead of having computer agents […] trying to solve the whole problem by themselves, we can create cyber-human systems where human and machine agents work together on the same problem […] In this way, humans can supply the general intelligence and other specialized skills that machines don’t have. The machines can supply the knowledge and other specialized capabilities that people don’t have”.
If a future business organizes itself to promote a symbiotic human-AI relationship, polymathy and the Powerskills we have written about and presented are at the heart of the human side of the equation, they are the human part of the ‘cyborg’. We would argue that the collective intelligence suggested by the Powerskills goes beyond the functional – indeed the human skills are equally (if not more) emotional that functional. More EQ than IQ. The AI intelligence in the network takes much of the functional burden. A coming together of these skills in individuals and the collective – the human intelligence - combined with the functional capabilities of the AI systems – the artificial intelligence – creates the organization’s Supermind.
“Does this mean you have to agree that groups are conscious in order to understand and take advantage of […] collective intelligence. No, you don’t. But especially as new information technologies allow us to build more and more intelligent combinations of people and computers […] it will become more and more useful to think of many kinds of superminds as conscious” Thomas Malone
[1] O’Lemmon, M (2020). The Technological Singularity as the Emergence of a Collective Consciousness: An Anthropological Perspective. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society
[2] Chen Q, Yang H, Rooks B, et al. Autonomic flexibility reflects learning and associated neuroplasticity in old age. Human Brain Mapping. 2020;41(13):3608-19. doi:10.1002/hbn.25034
[3] Mateos-Aparicio P, Rodríguez-Moreno A. The Impact of Studying Brain Plasticity. Front Cell Neuroscience. 2019
[4] Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (2007) Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything