Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

The main stakes for humanity are not hunger, poverty, sustainability, peace, healthcare, education, economy, natural resources or a host of other issues but our capability to build new social organizations to replace those that no longer provide such outcomes. Our main stake is Collective Intelligence. Today large organizations encounter insurmountable difficulties when dealing with the complexity and the unexpectedness of the world when operating against a global backdrop. They undergo conflicts of interest in many areas—between profitability and sustainability, secrecy and transparency, values and value, individual and collective dynamics, and knowledge fertilizing—that opens—and competition—that closes. What most medium and large organizations have in common is an infrastructure based on pyramidal hard-coded social maps, command and control, labor division, and a monetary system stimulated by scarcity. Until recently, this social architecture was the only information system at our disposal to pilot and organize complex human edifices. We call it pyramidal collective 1 Founder and President of www.TheTransitioner. org, an international research network and think tank of pioneers who are committed to support the emergence of global wisdom driven organizations. Formerly he was one of the co-founders of AOL France and led an assortment of innovative high-tech companies. FROM PYRAMIDAL TO GLOBAL 226 intelligence. It remains efficient as long as the environment remains stable, but it becomes vulnerable and inefficient in fluctuating contexts, namely when markets, knowledge, culture, technology, external interactions, economy or politics keep changing faster than the capability of the group to respond. Evolution has provided humankind with specific social skills based on collaboration and mutual support. These skills reach their maximum effectiveness within small groups of ten to twenty people, but no more, where the individual and collective benefit is higher than what would have been obtained if everyone remained alone. We call it original collective intelligence. As individuals, we all know what it is because it is very likely that we have experienced it at some degree in our lives. Well-trained, small teams have interesting dynamic properties. These include transparency, a gift economy, a collective awareness, a polymorphic social structure, a high learning capacity, a convergence of interest between the individual and collective levels, interactions characterized by human warmth, and, above all, an excellent capability to handle complexity and the unexpected. Is it possible for large organizations to benefit from the same properties? Can they become as reactive, flexible, transparent, responsive, and innovative as small teams? Can they evolve even further, toward a global Collective Intelligence? Can they conjugate their interests with overriding concerns of humanity such as ethics, sustainability, etc.? The answer today is a resounding yes. It is not only possible, but absolutely necessary for not just the efficiency of these organizations but above all for the well-being of human society. The aim of this paper is to provide the key concepts underlying collective intelligence and to explore how modern organizations and individuals can concretely learn how to increase their collective intelligence, i.e. their capability to collectively invent the future and reach it in complex contexts. This will draw the guidelines of a universal governance, provide an outline of the next governance paradigms and help us forecast an economy in which competition and collaboration as well as values and value are reconciled. INTEGRAL APPROACHES AND GLOBAL CONTEXTS 227 About collective intelligence Collective intelligence is neither a new concept nor a discovery. It is what shapes social organizations—groups, tribes, companies, teams, governments, nations, societies, guilds, etc.—where individuals gather together to share and collaborate, and find an individual and collective advantage that is higher than if each participant had remained alone. Collective intelligence is what we term a positive-sum economy. On a strictly behavioral level and if we exclude the symbolic layer of culture, collective intelligence communities are not exclusively a human prerogative, these are observed within many social animal species, from the ant-hill to the wolf pack and the fish shoal, when the emerging level is manifestly smarter than its individual components. In human societies, different forms of collective intelligence coexist and mainly coordinate and express themselves in the symbolic space. Let's review them so that we are able to understand the mutation and evolution towards a Collective Intelligence (with capital letters) at the planetary level. Civilization and collective pyramidal intelligence Labor division, authority, scarce money, standards and norms How can the two limits of original collective intelligence—the number of participants and distance separating them—be bypassed? What social machinery could be implemented in order to coordinate and maximize the power of the masses? How could communities of communities be harmonized and synchronized? For tasks such as building, planning, cultivating, transporting or manufacturing and creating such as erecting temples at the glory of the Gods, human works required more and more muscular strength as well as specialization, namely a large number of participants. This was a situation that characterized the beginning of history (defined as the birth of writing) and the early days of large civilizations. This mutation is absolutely original since it shows almost no perceptible change in our physical constitution, unlike in the animal world. Our brain, our body and our genetic code are the same as they were a few tens of thousands years ago, yet all has changed. The piece is played on another stage, the one of the noosphere—the mind—on which the “invisible” ecology of symbols, myths, knowledge, beliefs, data, is what organizes the social life, visible to our FROM PYRAMIDAL TO GLOBAL 228 organic senses (biosphere). With the invention of the writing, man has open the era (area) of the territory. Signs engraved on physical supports were first used for counting, managing, and norming, lay down the outlines and the surface of a territory, list, define belongings and exclusions, permissions and restrictions. For the first time, a message was able to circulate without being physically attached to its issuer, in a different time and space. The qualifier, the fact, the counting, the law, the description. objectified themselves in the circulating object graven with symbols, and sealed the object-signifier-signified trio. This symbolic labeling of the world was also applied to humans themselves. Thus name, profession, qualification, wealth, facts, misdemeanors, caste and lineage became important attributes that positioned an individual in the social geography. Writing is, in essence, the core technology of the State. Equipped with this extraordinary capacity to send signifiers over long distances toward a virtually unlimited number of recipients, pyramidal collective intelligence was launched and gave birth to civilizations and their States. The four dynamic principles of pyramidal collective intelligence Four fundamental principles constitute the universal signature of these human edifices, no matter whether these are companies, administrations, governments, armies, religious organizations or empires. These are: 1. Labor division: everyone has to cast himself in a predefined role in order to allow people interchange. An immediate corollary is the division of access to information, which establishes a context opposed to holopticism, i.e. panopticism—controlled and partitioned information—that we will detail later. 2. Authority: from divine right, by affiliation, by merit, by expertise, by law, by diplomas. No matter the legitimating principle, authority institutes a pawl effect, an asymmetry in the information transmission between the emitter and the receiver, and sets up a command and control dynamics (C). Authority determines the rules, INTEGRAL APPROACHES AND GLOBAL CONTEXTS 229 assigns rights and prerogatives, organizes the territories (thus labor division), and distributes wealth by means of the money. 3. A scarce currency: money is historically a social convention and an information system made to allow the market to function. It serves as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Unlike what many people believe, scarcity is not an inherent quality of money, but an artificially maintained property. Scarcity generates channels of allegiance from those who need toward those who have. It naturally catalyzes the hierarchies of pyramidal collective intelligence. This phenomenon of hierarchization is strongly accelerated by the Pareto effect (the more we have, the more we earn) that we will explore later. 4. Standards and norms: they allow the objectification as well as the circulation and the interoperability of knowledge within the community. Language is itself a standard. As for circulating artifacts (electronic components, pieces of machinery, materials, etc.) they all have a ‘jointing pattern’ made to chain their added value and build more complex functional sets. The strength and the stability of organizations built on pyramidal collective intelligence largely stem from the fact its four founding principles mutually reinforce and legitimize themselves. Wealth is distributed by those in authority, hierarchies are catalyzed by scarce money, and inclusion-exclusion rules are established by standards and norms, and so on. Today pyramidal collective intelligence still drives most aspects of human organizations. From the point where the number of participants and the intervening distances exceed that inherent in original collective intelligence, this basic form of such intelligence is no longe