The emergence of machine-based artificial intelligence (generative AI) has captivated popular interest. Terms such as “containment” and “the control problem”, both related to maintaining control over entities with superhuman intelligence, have entered the popular lexicon. But generative AI is not the first artificial intelligence that humanity has encountered. What we commonly think of as “organizations” - corporations, governments, universities, and organized religions - are actually aggregate intelligences formed from collections of humans themselves. Humanity has faced - and sometimes lost - the control problem before. In this article I explore the phenomenon of aggregate intelligence.
Humans are social because throughout our evolutionary environment belonging to even a small tribe greatly increased our chance of survival, even as it posed new challenges. In evolutionary timeframes, aggregate intelligences larger than tribes are relatively new. Some aggregate intelligences, including as armies and organized religion, have been with humanity for thousands of years. Others, such as the modern nation-state and its associated bureaucracy, have evolved into newer forms within a handful of human lifetimes. However, two forms of recently evolved aggregate intelligence deserve special consideration.
Corporations have existed for hundreds of years, but not in their present form. The corporations existing during the American colonial period, such as the British East India Trading Company, were royal delegations of monarchal power. Their role was established by, and limited by, a royal charter. Once the American Revolution decoupled the state from the monarchy, corporate charters in the United States derived from the states but were strictly limited in scope and were not perpetual. A corporation formed to build a bridge was not allowed to engage in other business, and was dissolved once the bridge was built or its charter expired. During the 1800’s corporations began to push at these entities by employing trusts, which were perpetual and whose charters were broader and less regulated. They were then constrained for a time by the “trust-busting” Progressive movement, culminating in the United States with the administration of President Teddy Roosevelt and the drafting and use of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which dismembered some of the larger and most powerful corporations such as Standard Oil.
Superintelligent and super-capable entities, however, are not long constrained, and they have since reconstructed the landscape to better suit their purposes. Today most corporate charters worldwide allow for perpetual existence and doing business for “all lawful purposes.” Corporations also possess advantages that other, more ephemeral, forms of aggregate intelligence such as online communities lack, such as the ability to own property, open and use bank accounts, and access legal systems.
The internet, the most disruptive technological revolution of the modern day until the development of artificial intelligence, introduced profoundly powerful communications capabilities. These restructured the cognitive landscape in two significant ways: the rise of online communities and the large-scale capture and control of human intelligence by corporations.
Online communities fall into two categories: “open” and “closed”. Open communities, such as 4chan or Usenet, are either unmoderated or lightly moderated by members, and are sometimes decentralized. Closed communities, which are usually owned by a corporation, enforce centrally controlled moderation via a “trust and safety” team. Reddit, for example, began as an open community but has moved steadily towards the closed model.
Open online communities
Open online communities function as superintelligent human swarms, in which any member can pose a question or answer and others can efficiently respond, both by providing information and ranking responses. Decentralized online communities have also achieved super-capability, able to mobilize “arms and legs” resources globally and to efficiently draw on members’ specialized capabilities. 4chan’s /pol/ board, much despised by the popular press, honed its ability to localize any image or recording globally and recruit local agents for physical actions through a “capture the flag” battle with actor Shia LeBouf. 4chan’s /sg/ board also fought an intelligence war against the terrorist state ISIS, successfully locating ISIS resources and passing the information on to Russia for airstrikes. This marked perhaps the first war between a nation-state and an internet-based aggregate intelligence.
Closed online communities
The rise of the web, with its centralized producer-consumer model, led to the development of the social media ecosystem. These are closed online communities owned by corporations and run for the purpose of human intelligence capture. They provide the ability for users to access the superintelligence of their personal social networks. However the social network is essentially the property of its corporate owner, itself an aggregate intelligence, which pursues an underlying advertising-based business model in which the users are the product.
By utilizing recommender engine AIs in a battle for “eyeballs and clicks,” social media corporations effectively conducted extensive and unethical psychological experiments on their users, hacking the human reward system’s neural circuitry to “promote engagement.” Triggering anger or anxiety proved to be effective mechanisms to capture users’ attention. The result was a generational public mental and physical health crisis, with words like “doom-scrolling” entering the public lexicon and political polarization reaching extreme levels.
In summary: both open and closed online communities are forms of aggregate intelligence, but closed communities are owned and controlled by corporations, which are themselves another form of aggregate intelligence.
If organizations have their own effective intelligence, could we test it directly? Perhaps. Let’s consider giving an intelligence test an aggregate intelligence. Could we give an online community an intelligence test? Of course, and it would likely do well because of its communication structure - any member can propose an answer, and its upvote/downvote mechanism allows the ensemble to rapidly collect the best answers.
Could we give an intelligence test to a corporation or a government? That is more difficult, because they are not set up to answer those kinds of questions. If we submitted customer support cases with IQ test questions, for example, they would likely be processed slowly and perhaps not answered effectively. However if a corporation decided it was in its best interest to build an appropriate communications channel to handle such questions, it certainly could do so.
The direct application of intelligence tests in online communities represents an active current area of research [2] [3], but I have found no such testing of corporations or governments. Since corporations or governments are not set up to take IQ tests effectively, I see a need to develop indirect assessments of the intelligence or capability of an aggregate intelligence as we work to better understand these entities. The development of such tools remains an area for future work.
