Collective intelligence

We know through data that it works pretty well, but we know also through data that sometimes it doesn't work well, and we don't know why.

I really connected to the idea of the whole world is about collective intelligence.

It's about the fabric.

It's about how everything has to interact with one another.

And I was like, this is fireworks.

This is amazing.

I really connected to the idea of, you know, the whole world is about collective intelligence.

It's not about one individual being and how I am going to be autonomous and how I'm going to be, you know, if I'm an agent, how I'm coded or how I function by myself.

Indeed, and I think that is the next era.

It's the era of collective intelligence rather than the era of individual intelligence.

The way that most people use, um, agents at the moment is one-to-one, right? Um, sometimes it's one-to-many.

You know, I might have multiple agents, um, running at once.

But at Inherent, we think that that is a somewhat impoverished way of using agents.

In fact, i-if human society only operated by one-to-one relationships, then we would be able to, um, have a-- we, we-- That would really slow down the rate at which we could do cultural evolution.

So we really see the problem of using agents and developing collective intelligence as many-to-many.

How can we build surfaces that enable many humans to be collaborating with many agents and intervening in a very organic way at, at different points in the cycle? Um, and I think that extends also to the physical world.

So to conclude with just a word I heard today I thought would fit this conclusion.

I heard Brian Eno earlier today talk about the underrated importance of collective intelligence.

It's like we are obsessed with singling out individuals like great artists and select who gets to be part of the canon when actually these individuals are nothing without a context, a group of people.

that allowed them to thrive.

This is why humans have built teams, organizations, laboratories, governments, hospitals, companies, sports teams, and communities.

Collective intelligence is not simply about having more brains.

It's about how those brains interact.

Now reverse the situation.

It's a viewpoint that is allowing me to make some different kinds of decisions.

And so it's seeing the collective intelligence as a crucial tool.

And slowing things down a little bit, really resisting the urge to make a decision, but rather give it a little bit of space to sense into it so it allows you to make that better decision because the system is moving really quickly at the moment.

And so are you seeing corps and organisations holding off on responding?

Because that is a magical thing that happens often in our engagements with friends in the pods and in the Epoch journey dynamic that we've been developing the last five years, where in speaking with another person often or with more people, it's like a whole new world comes alive that alone you wouldn't be able to.

So it's like we form together a kind of collective intelligence, a collective loom or a web where we each hold very strongly a node of this web.

that allows maybe the access to or provides a platform for a higher knowledge to land upon that.

So I find this fascinating.

[gunshots]

Hence why I describe LLMs not as AI, which summons fantasies of bad sci-fi movies, but as CI, collective intelligence.

The intelligence is all ours.

LLMs are just a new way to collectivize it, and a new way to collectivize our human intelligence is useful.

Which is why I disagree with Citron and other critics of LLMs themselves.

Boycotting LLMs is walking off the battlefield.

The corporations are one hundred percent happy for you to not claim the collective intelligence of humanity.

They'll just take it all without a fight.

And, and in this case, you want six people who are pretty sturdy and pretty capable of lifting and coordinating that kind of stuff, right? So you're like, who, how, what, right? A coordination team.

So when you explore the question of what is the appropriate kind of, and the, and the particular term here that I was using at the time is called collective intelligence, right? What, what the emergent properties of what happens when you coordinate a group of people together around a particular problem.

If the problem is the metacrisis, what is the collective intelligence that is the appropriate best way to address it, okay? And for reasons that I'm not going to go into, over a period of years it became more and more, uh, evident that this doesn't look like a technology company.

This doesn't look like a think tank.

It doesn't look like a university.

Which are, by the way, those are all variations on collective intelligence, right? How do I coordinate a group of people to achieve a very high level of capacity around some problem? It looks a lot more like a village.

It looks a lot more like the whole of the human types in very, very rich, complex, and oftentimes very subtle relationships.

And so as odd as it may seem, a team of 150 PhDs in, of diverse disciplines are less effective at addressing the metacrisis than a team of 150 people that includes grandmothers and infants.

eToro?Um, so first of all, the financial super app, the usage of AI, uh, the experience, uh, on the platform.

I think the most, uh, sort of the, the biggest sort of crown jewel on eToro at the end is the collective intelligence.

Mm-hmm.

So I've been trading the market since I was 13.