Not much we can agree on these dates. But two sweeping statements that can garner broad support are “We need to fix the technology” and “We need to fix democracy.”
It is increasingly recognized that rapid technological development is creating risks at the social scale: public and private surveillance, automation of ubiquitous labor, monopoly and monopolistic power. incremental growth, stagnant productivity growth, algorithmic discrimination, and the catastrophic risks posed by advances in areas like AI and biotechnology. . Less discussed, but in my view, equally important is the loss of potential advances that lack short-term or legitimate interest in the market. These include developing vaccines for diseases and open source communication for basic digital affordability such as identity and communication.
At the same time, as democracies falter in the face of complex global challenges, citizens (and increasingly elected leaders) around the world distrust in democratic processes and are shaken by authoritarian alternatives. Nation-state democracies are, to varying degrees, beset by stalemate and hyperpartisanship, less accountable to popular will, inefficient, and in limited state capacity. markup, inability to keep up with emerging technologies and enterprise grasp. While smaller-scale democracy experiments are growing, locally and globally, they are still too difficult to handle large-scale consequential governance decisions.
This puts us in a bind. Clearly, we may be doing a better job of directing the evolution of technology towards human development – in fact, this may be one of the greatest challenges of our time. If the current democracy is indeed full of holes, it doesn’t seem to be up to the task. Here’s what makes many calls for “democratization of technology” hollow: With so many complaints, why let a seemingly broken system be managed by another?
At the same time, as we tackle everything from surveillance to space travel, we desperately need ways to collectively negotiate complex value trade-offs with global consequences and how to share our benefits. they. This certainly sounds like a job for democracy, although a much better iteration. So how can we radically update democracy so that we can successfully work toward shared and long-term positive outcomes?
The case of collective wisdom
To answer these question, we must realize that our present forms of democracy are only early and very imperfect manifestations of collective wisdom—Coordination systems combine and process decentralized, agency, and meaningful decision-making between individuals and communities to make collective best-case decisions.
Collective intelligence, or CI, is not a human goal alone. The network of plants, activated by mycelium, can exhibit intelligent traits, share nutrients and send out danger signals about drought or insect attack. Bees and ants exhibit swarm intelligence through complex processes of selection, deliberation and consensus, using a vocabulary of body movements and pheromones. In fact, humans aren’t even the only animals pregnant. African wild dog, when deciding whether or not to move the site, engages in a sneeze to determine if quorum has been reached, with a context-defined cut-off point — for example, those The lower ranked person requires a minimum of 10 sneezes to reach the higher level – the ranked individual can only get with three. Buffaloes, baboons and meerkats also makes decisions through a quorum, with flexible “rules” based on behavior and negotiation.
But humans, unlike meerkats or ants, need not rely on the pathways to CI that our biology has hard-coded into us, or wait until the slow, invisible hand of the process evolution regulates our processes. We can do better on purpose, realizing that progress and participation need not be trade-offs. (This is the thesis that my organization, Collective intelligence projectpredicted.)
Our incremental innovations in CI systems — such as representation, nation-state democracy, capitalist and non-capitalist markets, and bureaucratic engineering — have shaped Modern world. However, we can do much better. Existing manifestations of collective intelligence are only rudimentary versions of the structure we maybe built to make better collective decisions than collective resources.
