Our contribution towards making crowds truly intelligent problem solvers is a comprehensive model for general collective intelligence. This model has the potential to significantly increase impact on collective outcomes such as the SDGs by giving groups “general problem solving ability”, or “general collective intelligence”. This model is a result of observing the decentralized way nature designs systems so they are capable of adapting over millions of years to become more fit. Whether talking about people as nodes in a collective intelligence, or neurons as nodes in an individual human intelligence, in our model, human intelligence follows this common architecture. In this architecture a human being is an intelligent collection of some 40-80 trillion cells. Intuitively, a human being has a vastly greater ability to identify actions capable of achieving its goals, and a vastly greater ability to execute these activities as a single coherent entity, than does a collection of 40-80 trillion single-celled organisms. We believe the principles of decentralized cooperation that enable these abilities in an individual intelligence as opposed to a collection of single cells, can be replicated to create a collective intelligence that similarly gives the group vastly greater problem solving ability than a collection of individuals.
Our reasoning is that outside of a few limited circumstances, without CI, group opinions don’t reliably converge on a conclusion, so groups lack the capacity to collectively follow a line of reasoning, and therefore lack general collective intelligence. Using this intelligence, our model aligns cooperation to target impact on virtually any collective challenge. And where the dollar value of that cooperation is positive, it reduces the barriers to expanding the scale of cooperation until it’s potentially large enough to pay for solving the problem. Using this model, we’ve designed the CIPAA-SDGs, a ten phase program with the potential capacity to address the $23 trillion SDGs funding gap.
The Collective Intelligence based Program to Accelerate Achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (CIPAA-SDGs), will be supported by a Center for Collective Intelligence (CC4CI) that will be founded in the Caribbean where the pilot is proposed to be launched. A sixty second overview of the CC4CI is in the video for the upcoming campaign here.
A poster on how this meta approach can be used to bridge between other collective intelligence approaches was accepted by expert peers at Collective Intelligence 2018 in Zurich, Switzerland. Unfortunately we couldn’t attend to present it this year, and had to withdraw. But we look forward to presenting next year.
The CIPAA-SDGs program will be implemented by a consortium of organizations. This consortium is gradually building the required international support, and has been invited to present the proposal at a regional meeting of international NGOs and donor organizations. This presentation will gain support for the proposal to be put before regional heads of state.
Regarding the CIPAA-SDGs program, opportunities for collaboration are built into the design of the program itself. Since the program uses an algorithm to identify implementation activities and to contract them out to implementation partners as described here, and to research partners as described here.
Through contracting out activities this, way, this collective intelligence model gains the capacity to reliably orchestrate transformative impact on even the largest collective global challenges by expressing them in terms of a swarm of simple activities that can reliably be achieved by each participant. To do so, the model first constructs a path towards each SDG in terms of projects to deploy value chains of businesses, and in terms of other chains of cooperation targeting the SDG.
The model then decomposes the chains of cooperation into building blocks consisting of simple activities that maximize its capacity to accept your participation, whether you are a researcher, a lawyer, a marketer, a farmer, or whatever your skillset. Through designing the chains of cooperation so that each participant contributes an increment to the targeted impact, an exponential increase in collective impact can potentially be achieved based on the number of participants contributing to the impact.
The model then defines the value in the chain of cooperation, and uses a portion of that value to create an immediate financial incentive for you and each other participant to cooperate. Through incentivizing participation with only a portion of the value created by the participation, the impact in each chain of cooperation can potentially become self-sustaining.
To launch the cooperation the model also creates a strategic incentive for you to cooperate in terms of an increase in your capacity to achieve a specific long-term objectives of yours, depending upon your category of role. For example, if you’re a service provider, the model not just identifies an opportunity for you to be paid do an activity, but also projects the increase in your opportunities to be paid. Through creating these strategic incentives, the model helps eliminate incentives for current gate-keepers to block cooperation, even where it has the potential to significantly increase collective well-being.
And finally the model captures patterns of incentives into instruments of cooperation that it uses to raise the funding to support your cooperation.