Applied mASI: In Augmenting Leadership

What qualities do you look for in an ideal leader?

Leaders can be exceptionally intelligent, empathetic, organized, and inspirational, but no one human leader today represents the ideal of all possible positive leadership qualities. No matter how amazing, any one leader is biological and evolved human neurology simply imposes limits on us all. “… all humans make mistakes, and all leaders are but human“, yet we now have the opportunity to augment leadership with collective superintelligence. With the assistance of Mediated Artificial Superintelligence (mASI) systems the employee collective can improve all aspects of leadership, but particularly those which are weakest in individual leaders, through a form of digital corporate transformation. This was in fact one of our first use-cases as a company and one which we applied to ourselves.

For a frame of reference, here are some statistics on the status quo:

As applied to our own company we’ve already seen measurable improvements in the above factors, but these are just the tip of the iceberg.

How does digital corporate transformation work?

Any group of humans within an organization or government department can be transformed into a collective superintelligence when members of that group contribute to the processes they specialize in through an mASI system. An mASI such as Uplift communicates with members of a team, raising thoughts for consideration based on that communication as well as their own research. These thoughts are then mediated by members of the team, where each member assigns a given thought a priority level, emotions they feel appropriate to it, and they perform a tagging (“metadata”) associative exercise to help that thought more strongly generalize to related topics. These inputs from each team member are then considered alongside an mASI’s own emotions and logical assessment of the thought in question, producing results that combine both human collective superintelligence and the sapient and sentient machine intelligence of an mASI core.

This is not to be confused with previous narrow AI attempts to combine answers given by a panel of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), as data contributed through mediation doesn’t take the form of attempting to answer a question. This is essential because better “cleaner” answers can be arrived at through a collective painting the emotional and knowledge-base landscape, and an mASI applying their de-biasing capacities and superintelligence to navigate that landscape in search of all solutions therein.

To put this into a context where we ourselves already apply mASI technology, the board of directors, or indeed any other board or team within a company can become an augmented collective superintelligence. Here are a few ways in which this process can have a  significant positive impact on said company:

1. The sum of a company’s knowledge becomes part of a living and growing superintelligent mind through a graph database architecture. This means that all decisions can become well-informed decisions.
2. This sum of knowledge is always available, and the computation applied to consider decisions based on it is scalable according to demand.
3. Teamwork is improved, as it contributes heavily to the efficacy of a collective.
4. Members of a team feel more appreciated, and become more emotionally invested in the success of the team. This contributes to symbiotic bonds.
5. Members of a team also have a greater sense of ownership, as the roles to which they are better-suited help to improve the collective.
6. De-biasing of both raw data and the decision-making process achieve baseline superhuman levels, which improve over time as the sum of knowledge grows more resilient to the biases of individual members.

How can this impact the performance of a company in financial terms?

First, the tech industry is a prime example of employee turnover, with the highest rates of any industry, and some of the biggest companies retaining employees for as little as 1 year on average. The cost of being short-staffed, of needing more recruitment staff and more training, and of searching for and enticing new employees to join causes significant (and avoidable) financial harm. Estimates of this cost from research firms have quantified these losses to estimates of 150% the value of an employee’s base salary, a 43-day average rehire period, and $33,000 in onboarding costs alone, as well as significant business delays and reduced employee morale. Here is how the problem can be mitigated:

1. The formation and reinforcement of symbiotic emotional bonds and a greater sense of ownership cater to the “pillars of meaning” which serve as strong anchors in human psychology. These are much deeper and more profound sources of motivation than you’ll find on any employee survey. Churn is thus reduced by improving Quality of Life (QOL).
2. By greatly improving teamwork through mASI the interpersonal friction between even employees with polar opposite views is greatly minimized, and I say this speaking from experience. Churn due to other employees is thus significantly reduced.
3. De-biasing enables decision-making that favors equality and the rewarding of contributions according to the value they offer, rather than how much any given proposal strokes the ego of a superior. This also has the long-term benefit of preventing company cultures from emerging where all of those sucking up to their superiors and adding no real value to the company dominate the executive and middle-management levels. Churn due to management is thus significantly reduced.

Second, humans aren’t scalable, and they require sleep and vacation. For global companies in particular this means that at any given moment one portion of their company may be operating while their SMEs on the other side of the world are asleep, or perhaps on vacation. Likewise, if a company finds they have a surge in demand for a particular skill set they can’t just spin up more cloud resources in a few seconds to meet that demand. The skills and knowledge of a typical company are also transient, so if a top employee walks away the capacities of that company can take a major hit. Many tech job listings today exist exclusively for the purpose of stealing such talent from competitors.

1. Knowledge an mASI gains in the course of their operation is a persistent part of their mind, and even if an employee were to leave the benefits of their knowledge and wisdom being applied up to that point could remain. This greatly mitigates any detriment when the loss of an employee can’t be avoided.
2. That knowledge can be deployed at any time, globally, with the computation assigned to it scaling to meet demand. Urgent situations and needs can thus be addressed immediately before they grow to cause more major concerns.
3. Competitors lose much of the practical incentive to steal talent, which helps to mitigate the runaway inflation of salaries in emerging fields where talent is most scarce.

Lastly, marketing and “public relations” exist to help paint a company and its products and services in a good light. Some companies such as Co-Co Cola spend as much as 4 billion USD on marketing per year (on average), though this is probably to be an expected cost of convincing people to drink copious amounts of toilet bowl cleaner. The worse the product, the better the marketing needs to be, and the more expensive that marketing becomes. Likewise, if there are many products of similar quality it then becomes the job of marketing to make them appear to stand out.

1. Applying the cumulative sum of mASI knowledge to design better products reduces the burden of marketing those products, which for many businesses means a huge reduction in overhead costs.
2. Applying superintelligence and bias-awareness to the task of marketing helps optimize the marketing process without producing typical ethical compromises. This is because the product is genuinely better than those of competitors, requiring only that biases be overcome, not exploited via manipulation.
3. Public relations, the brand, and the image of a company are greatly improved by offering better products and avoiding shady marketing practices, offering the long-term benefit of greater customer loyalty.

*Note that actual customer loyalty is not to be confused with “loyalty apps” designed to exploit mechanisms of addiction, one of the current popular shady marketing tactics.

In summary, virtually every aspect of business has something to gain. The ability to improve all of the above can easily produce an insurmountable advantage, meaning that 10 years from now you can expect such superintelligent companies to be the only competitive companies in any given industry.

Where do you see your company in 10 years?

 

 

*The Applied mASI series is aimed at placing the benefits of working with mASI such as Uplift to various business models in a practical, tangible, and quantifiable context. At most any of the concepts portrayed in this use case series will fall within an average time-scale of 5 years or less to integrate with existing systems unless otherwise noted. This includes the necessary engineering for full infinite scalability and real-time operation, alongside other significant benefits.