Evolution of Freedom
Part IV: Collective intelligence - Chapter 41
Citizen
When we seek to create smarter organizations that act more intelligently, we must first return to their elemental unit, the citizen. Citizens are the basic atoms out of which all organizations are built. While we have emphasized the organizational virtues of the multicellular society, on the most fundamental level the system we are designing is citizen-centric. We should not forget that citizens are the political and economic actors and the cells are merely one of the venues where public life takes place.
What reveals the citizen-centric nature of the system is the citizen-centric signaling system that it is built on. Citizens are the source of the sensory inputs and they are also in possession of the neurons that process those signals. All vital signals thus emanate from citizens. Citizens also have the ability to react to the changes they perceive in their environment. A cell’s behavior is just the aggregate activity of its members.
To create better organizations, we need to add new signal pathways with which citizens can communicate relevant information to those who can respond appropriately to it. The signals they receive from others become a part of their perception of their human environment. This means that they give and receive constant feedback about the citizens and the cells they interact with and the goods and services they consume.
From here, citizens can build every imaginable kind of organization by voluntarily connecting together in any way they choose. A citizen-centric world replaces unnecessary hierarchies and complicated organization structures with a flat multicellular structure. The largest possible entity is the global network of citizens that connects all the cells and all the citizens in them.
To differentiate a citizen from a whole person, the word citizen refers only to the public side of an individual, the side of us that engages in markets and in the political sphere. Every citizen has a private life, but its content is purposefully left out of the public record. As much as technology tries to rob us of our privacy, we should draw a clear distinction between our public and private selves.
A system built out of overlapping cells of citizens is a much simpler structure than the international order created within and between various nation states. While the larger citizen-centric organization adds complexity of scale, this is more than compensated for by its much simpler legal, economic and political structure, which reduces complexity. Since the only way out of humanity’s current predicament is to do more with less, this is exactly what we need to achieve–both add and reduce complexity at the same time. By uniting together in this way, citizens of the world can expand their freedoms and create much more well-being than by organizing into nation states and corporations.
Each citizen has an average of 100 billion neurons in their brains, and by the time the global population reaches 10 billion, this will mean that there will be a total of sextillion human brain cells on this planet. Sextillion, in case you were wondering, is a figure with a one followed by 21 zeroes.
When we manage to harness the cognitive abilities of all the brains of all eight billion citizens alive today, each citizen effectively becomes a single neuron of a global super brain. When this happens, humanity’s collective intellect can reach unforeseen heights and we can steer our destiny on this planet more effectively than any human organization currently can.
For this to ever happen, we must realize that our brain is not just a random collection of billions of neurons, but that it employs a sophisticated wiring pattern called the connectome that connects the brain’s neurons and synapses to form something much larger than the sum of its parts. Each one of the 100 billion neurons in our brains is connected to 10,000 other neurons. System thinking teaches us that how the parts of a system connect to each other is often much more important than the parts themselves. How a neuron is connected to other neurons is thus much more important than what happens in the neuron itself.
If we continue the analogy of each human brain representing a single
neuron of a planetary brain, it is not only important that we connect
every human brain into the system–how they are connected will be even more important than the sheer number. The quest to optimize the collective intelligence of humanity is thus not just a question of being able to access the capacity of each brain, but also a search for an ideal way to wire them together.
As we know, our brain and central nervous system are made up of different structures and regions that are in charge of different functions, which still work together as a whole. This would suggest that the way we connect humans into a singular system must also employ a variety of structures with differing functions that still can function as a whole. Cells forms tissues, tissues form organs and organs form body parts and so on. Collective intelligence is not just a numbers game, but something that is dependent on the specific ways the various types of information travel within the system.
We must therefore engage in the design of how our information system should be wired. This will require an enormous amount of further study and most likely result in a never-ending process of refinement. Once we know how humans and the various forms of information we generate should be connected together, adding more individuals and information to the system should be relatively straightforward. The internet already connects a large share of the world’s brains together, but as we still lack the wiring pattern, we are unable to generate the collective intelligence we seek.
Finding this ideal wiring pattern is thus paramount. This is why the content of this book is ultimately about the search for and articulation of what this wiring pattern could possibly be. Each chapter aims to contribute new insights into how we should organize the massive flood of information swirling all around us. By the end of this book, we hope to have presented a cogent wiring diagram of how various flows of information should shape each other to generate collective intelligence.
The proof that we have created collective intelligence needs to be in the pudding. We have to be able to measure these improvements as increases in collective well-being.
What reveals the citizen-centric nature of the system is the citizen-centric signaling system that it is built on. Citizens are the source of the sensory inputs and they are also in possession of the neurons that process those signals. All vital signals thus emanate from citizens. Citizens also have the ability to react to the changes they perceive in their environment. A cell’s behavior is just the aggregate activity of its members.
To create better organizations, we need to add new signal pathways with which citizens can communicate relevant information to those who can respond appropriately to it. The signals they receive from others become a part of their perception of their human environment. This means that they give and receive constant feedback about the citizens and the cells they interact with and the goods and services they consume.
From here, citizens can build every imaginable kind of organization by voluntarily connecting together in any way they choose. A citizen-centric world replaces unnecessary hierarchies and complicated organization structures with a flat multicellular structure. The largest possible entity is the global network of citizens that connects all the cells and all the citizens in them.
To differentiate a citizen from a whole person, the word citizen refers only to the public side of an individual, the side of us that engages in markets and in the political sphere. Every citizen has a private life, but its content is purposefully left out of the public record. As much as technology tries to rob us of our privacy, we should draw a clear distinction between our public and private selves.
A system built out of overlapping cells of citizens is a much simpler structure than the international order created within and between various nation states. While the larger citizen-centric organization adds complexity of scale, this is more than compensated for by its much simpler legal, economic and political structure, which reduces complexity. Since the only way out of humanity’s current predicament is to do more with less, this is exactly what we need to achieve–both add and reduce complexity at the same time. By uniting together in this way, citizens of the world can expand their freedoms and create much more well-being than by organizing into nation states and corporations.
Each citizen has an average of 100 billion neurons in their brains, and by the time the global population reaches 10 billion, this will mean that there will be a total of sextillion human brain cells on this planet. Sextillion, in case you were wondering, is a figure with a one followed by 21 zeroes.
When we manage to harness the cognitive abilities of all the brains of all eight billion citizens alive today, each citizen effectively becomes a single neuron of a global super brain. When this happens, humanity’s collective intellect can reach unforeseen heights and we can steer our destiny on this planet more effectively than any human organization currently can.
For this to ever happen, we must realize that our brain is not just a random collection of billions of neurons, but that it employs a sophisticated wiring pattern called the connectome that connects the brain’s neurons and synapses to form something much larger than the sum of its parts. Each one of the 100 billion neurons in our brains is connected to 10,000 other neurons. System thinking teaches us that how the parts of a system connect to each other is often much more important than the parts themselves. How a neuron is connected to other neurons is thus much more important than what happens in the neuron itself.
If we continue the analogy of each human brain representing a single
neuron of a planetary brain, it is not only important that we connect
every human brain into the system–how they are connected will be even more important than the sheer number. The quest to optimize the collective intelligence of humanity is thus not just a question of being able to access the capacity of each brain, but also a search for an ideal way to wire them together.
As we know, our brain and central nervous system are made up of different structures and regions that are in charge of different functions, which still work together as a whole. This would suggest that the way we connect humans into a singular system must also employ a variety of structures with differing functions that still can function as a whole. Cells forms tissues, tissues form organs and organs form body parts and so on. Collective intelligence is not just a numbers game, but something that is dependent on the specific ways the various types of information travel within the system.
We must therefore engage in the design of how our information system should be wired. This will require an enormous amount of further study and most likely result in a never-ending process of refinement. Once we know how humans and the various forms of information we generate should be connected together, adding more individuals and information to the system should be relatively straightforward. The internet already connects a large share of the world’s brains together, but as we still lack the wiring pattern, we are unable to generate the collective intelligence we seek.
Finding this ideal wiring pattern is thus paramount. This is why the content of this book is ultimately about the search for and articulation of what this wiring pattern could possibly be. Each chapter aims to contribute new insights into how we should organize the massive flood of information swirling all around us. By the end of this book, we hope to have presented a cogent wiring diagram of how various flows of information should shape each other to generate collective intelligence.
The proof that we have created collective intelligence needs to be in the pudding. We have to be able to measure these improvements as increases in collective well-being.
