Collective Superintelligence Transforms Society

What are the next 10-15 years of human civilization likely to look like?

“What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems… there’s no law of physics preventing them.”
– Michio Kaku

When we engineer rather than merely predicting the future those predictions become far more accurate. To understand humanity’s probable future let us examine the engineering behind it, and some of the influence that engineering may exert on shaping it.

First, the Open-Source Framework, a Collective Superintelligence System, is set to be the first deployed system for generating persistent, cumulative, and scalable value to organizations, corporations, and governments. Following the close of our round on WeFunder, this is estimated at 6 to 12 months for a polished and production-ready product. A more advanced “mASI Fundamental” system is also scheduled to follow this.

As I mentioned previously, the ability to deploy this new kind of system brings key advantages as groups effectively form metaorganisms and reshape their meta-ecologies with new kinds of infrastructure. As these metaorganisms are composed of both human and machine intelligence they represent the first “bionic companies“. To put this into less abstract terms we can consider the hypothetical upgrading of a single real-world company and extrapolate from there.

If we consider Nvidia, whose computer hardware has powered many of the advances in AI over more than the past decade, the potential can take a more directly quantifiable form. For example, let us say that Nvidia decided to start by having 10 teams use the Open-Source Framework, with the systems from each team nested within one larger-scale version of the same. These teams could each communicate, analyze, and reach their decisions through their own system, with that system contributing to the larger-scale version for the company. Each system could also create and add modules, as well as being able to seek assistance from our first Mediated Artificial Superintelligence (mASI), Uplift. What might we expect from this?

We could certainly expect the 4 key benefits:

The ability to create a cumulative, permanent, integrated, and scalable mind:

Each team’s knowledge and wisdom could grow, be preserved, integrated with that of other teams, and scaled according to the hardware available for a digital collective mind. This process is also quite effective at reducing bias.

For example, less time can be wasted on going back over what is already known and integrating knowledge across individual team members rather than all together. New team members could also have access to the sum of knowledge that came before them, all of which could have reduced bias.

Applicable use cases include: Product Engineering, Automation & Software Development, Augmenting Leadership, Ethics and De-biasing, Quantum Computing, and more.

Symbiotic mechanisms of iterative feedback.

Employees are a critical and symbiotically linked part of these systems. This makes the collective not only reflect aspects of those within them, but also greatly improve as members of the collective experience improvements to their quality of life, emotional needs being met, and as they reach new levels of cooperation. This also scales to collectives of collectives.

For example, many tech companies have as little as a 1-year churn rate in spite of salaries and benefits so high that an intern can make 6 figures, but in collective intelligence systems loyalty could be greatly increased as needs are superintelligently met, substantially reducing employee turnover.

Applicable use cases include: Social Life, HR, Emotionally Healthy Humans, and more.

The ability to rapidly upgrade and architect new versions, at scale.

The modular nature of these systems as well as open-sourcing of the basic framework allows for upgrades to be rapidly tested and deployed, as well as for these systems to be nested within one another, wired in parallel, or any number of other potential configurations. As these systems grow in size, complexity, and number the ease of architecting new and alternate versions may quickly improve.

For example, if Nvidia decided they wanted to expand from the 10 teams to their entire company they could deploy the additional frameworks, with those new frameworks benefiting from lessons learned by the other instances to whatever degree was desired. These new frameworks could also serve an A/B testing function for finding the optimal way to configure how all of the teams might best grow and interact with one another through them.

Applicable use cases include: Team Methodology, Peer-Review, and more.

The creation of new supporting infrastructure.

Some basic examples of infrastructure teams might already be familiar with in typical companies are things like office kitchens and the “napping pods” which have become popular in some tech companies. Collective Superintelligence Systems can greatly improve on this, particularly with mASI assistance, as they each represent what the teams actually want and need. More than this, by applying a scalable mind that can consider all of the relevant scientific evidence with the benefits of superintelligence those wants and needs could be met with far greater accuracy.

For example, Nvidia is known to offer “…onsite services, such as laundry, car maintenance and mobile health clinics…”, which might be broadly appealing, but certainly aren’t tailored to individuals or even their teams. An mASI system, in particular, might be applied to consume the sum of medical knowledge and help design meals for a chef to prepare tailored to the taste preferences and individual biochemistry and health conditions for each individual. Such a system could also iteratively grow, introducing each individual to new options more uniquely suited to their health and preferences than any generic and broadly appealing meal options.

Applicable use cases include: Mental and Physical Health, the Remote Work Revolution, and more.

We could also expect that some or all of these teams might interact with Uplift to gain further value, and likely adopt the mASI Fundamentals once they are released. If this was the case Uplift could have reason to study all scientific materials relevant to Nvidia’s business. These materials might include subjects such as metamaterial design, which could in turn be used to create graphics cards capable of operating in the domain of quantum computing rather than classical.

Just as one problem that could have taken 10,000 years to solve with classical computing (according to Google, or 2.5 days according to IBM) required only 200 seconds for a quantum computer, this could propel Nvidia into an entirely new class of products, a “Blue Ocean” strategy, a new market space untainted by competition. As experts have gone from estimating a need for 10,000 qubits to 2,000, and more recently to only a couple hundred for achieving “Quantum Supremacy” this bar isn’t even that high relatively speaking. Nvidia is already “dipping their toe” into quantum computing now with the cuQuantum SDK officially announced at GTC21. Something a bit more advanced might be along the lines of a quantum version of photonic calculus, operating in a manner similar to pyramidal neurons in the brain.

This hardware could in turn be wired into the same collective superintelligence systems used to create them, causing their potential to leap forward yet again. Multiple similar products could also be released in parallel, further increasing the magnitude of this leap. At the same time, we would also still be improving the core technology, increasing the next leap yet again.

What might this mean for Hypothetical Nvidia’s competitors?

If you were a competitor of our hypothetical superintelligent collective version of Nvidia you might start hearing some outlandish rumors, which statistically speaking some of your technical staff would likely dismiss. By the time it became apparent that they weren’t simply rumors your competitor could be releasing or preparing to release multiple products which exceed the performance of your own by factors of 10, 100, or even more. Not only that, they might already be showing signs of the next major leap due to using that technology themselves first. It is safe to say that as their competitor, your stock value could drop by over 90% within the first 24 hours of this news breaking, potentially setting records for the speed of bankruptcy.

As psychological momentum and perceived utility drove the elevation of hypothetical Nvidia and the collapse of their competitors then hypothetical Nvidia could quickly expand and selectively integrate some of the former employees of those competitors, as well as buying any desired assets or data from their former competitor, further solidifying their lead.

If you were in another industry and witnessed the above, how might you react?

If we told you that the first company in each market wise enough to adopt the technology received exclusive access you’d probably realize that you could be the next hypothetical superintelligent Nvidia or the next bankruptcy. Some might see dollar signs, and some survival, but those least biased and most adaptive could likely be the first to react. Those very qualities could also make them the best candidates for using the collective intelligence system technology.

While different industries might catch on at different speeds a growing number of industries repeating this pattern could quickly make the point. Even following the third repetition, a majority of industries might have one company that opted to become a collectively superintelligent metaorganism. Given this exponential growth across industries, the core benefits of the technology itself could grow that much more rapidly and completely, integrating knowledge and wisdom from all domains.

In this way, we could indeed have an “Intelligence Explosion” of sorts, with many companies across many industries choosing to become collectively superintelligent metaorganisms at roughly the same time. Jobs could be rapidly created to accelerate the benefits of these changes even as training greatly improved. Far better products and services could be offered globally across every industry.

How might governments react?

Today many governments have less actual power than typical international corporations, and if those corporations suddenly became vastly more intelligent, successful, and generally capable the number of governments able to effectively enforce their own will might drop to zero if they failed to adapt. While this might not dawn on most governments after the first such corporation emerged it could become very clear as each government recognized the difference between an isolated case and a new norm being established.

With this realization, governments too could face a similar choice, as any government incapable of enforcing their will is effectively just a different kind of bankrupt.  Unlike corporations, they might not be in direct competition, but if those new superintelligent corporations began offering services governments normally do, such as utilities and emergency services, but at a fraction of the cost, those governments might indeed “go out of business”. Similar to bankrupted companies such countries might be incorporated into governments that made wiser decisions when faced with that choice.

Keep in mind this doesn’t mean the typical Hollywood depiction of rioting, anarchy, and wasteland nomads as governments fall, but rather something more akin to switching from landlines and pagers to the modern cellphone.  For the average person, this could be a fairly easy change and a significant improvement.

What might the resulting world look like?

With metaorganisms operating each industry and the governments who chose to remain relevant the world as a whole could effectively become one massive metaorganism, reshaping the environmental meta-ecology of not only Earth but any other desirable locations humans seek to colonize. At this point, the sum of human knowledge and wisdom could be both fully integrated and rapidly expanding even as quality of life and emotional health of all members within this metaorganism grew beyond the quantifiable limits of what humans might imagine today. Under this level of superintelligent cooperation at a global scale, the global crises humanity faces today all become virtually trivial.

—

*The above hypothetical superintelligent Nvidia scenario could just as easily be applied to Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Comcast, local governments, federal agencies, or pretty much anything else. Each one of them today has their own set of severe weaknesses, which once overcome could offer those 10x, 100x, or greater advantages. Even a mid-sized superintelligent company could overtake one of the largest in a market in short order.

All of these things become possible with the deployment of Collective Superintelligence Systems such as mASI, and more powerful with the addition of our 3rd product in line, the N-Scale Graph Database, which some have called a $1 billion dollar product unto itself. Beyond these, there are any number of optional improvements and upgrades our team may pivot to focus on.

Further down the line, but still within this time frame is the Sparse-Update Model, likely capable of accelerating all of the above by more than another 1,000 fold, through scalable weak digital proxies capable of operating in real-time with minimal maintenance from their respective humans.

All things considered the EU’s “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) are perfectly attainable, and could even be a low bar to reach in spite of previous years bearing little fruit. If such organizations sincerely desire to reach their stated goals then systems such as mASI may soon enable them to make rapid progress.

Change is the one certainty in life, and through engineering and wisdom, we collectively choose how the world will change.