While the human brain has an unparalleled capacity for intelligence, it is evident that this capacity doesn’t grow in proportion to the size of human organizations. A hundred-person organization doesn’t behave a hundred times more intelligently than a single individual. The inability of large organizations, be it nation states or multinational corporations, to leverage the intelligence of all their members stands as a key obstacle to human progress.

Simply put, most human organizations are not that smart.

Written language allowed human organizations to grow enormously in size. The number of individuals that make up cities, corporations and nation states can today be counted in the millions. But as human organizations grew, their capacity for collective intelligence stalled. It turns out that many human organizations don’t behave much more intelligently than their smartest member. Paradoxically, one of the culprits was written language. Where written language could greatly expand our ability to cooperate, it came at the price of speed, veracity and intelligence.

The problem for the past 6000 years was that written language could only be stored and transmitted as a physical copy. As a result, large human organizations suffered from a serious bandwidth problem, which had a profound effect on their structure. To collect and disseminate information from the field to the decision-makers and back required the establishment of massive bureaucracies.

Since intelligent behavior is dependent on a continuous flow of information, the time it takes for information to travel up and down the chain of command can be so slow that by the time the organization responds, the environment may have already changed in such a way that warrants a different kind of a response. Even plants, which use calcium signals for internal communication, can respond to changes in their environment quicker.

In human organizations, messages composed on the field would often pass through the hands of numerous intermediaries before reaching the top of the organization. By then their content would be distorted, combined with other information or discarded altogether. Since only a fraction of the sensory information generated in the field was available to those who made the final decisions, large organizations would essentially be making their decisions partly blind.

What makes the situation even worse is that delivering bad news up the chain of command can be an unthankful and often hazardous task. As a result, bureaucratic structures are likely to distort the signal by brushing problems under the carpet. This means that the structure of the organization changes how it perceives its environment and thus the way it responds to it. Wars have been lost and empires have fallen because the veracity of the information was lost during transmission.

Large human organizations also had another bandwidth problem: the amount of available brain cells or neurons that were dedicated to making the decisions. Since very few data were actually transmitted within the organization and at very slow speeds, a few human brains at the top of the organization were perfectly capable of responding to the trickle of information coming at them.

Most human organizations rely on a tiny group of individuals to make their most important decisions. In some cases, it is only one person who calls the shots. In a normal government cabinet, for example, there are perhaps a dozen individuals involved in making the most critical decisions that can affect hundreds of millions of citizens. The same goes for corporate boards, where a small group can make decisions for tens of thousands of employees, investors and customers.

What is peculiar about large human organizations is how the great majority of the available neurons in the organization are consciously excluded from the decision-making process. In an organization structured this way, responding intelligently becomes next to impossible. In terms of collective intelligence, this is equivalent to a lobotomy.

It is evident that such organizations are not built to optimize their decisions. Instead, they are structured to give its most powerful members the most say. This kind of governance follows the same toxic logic behind most of our failing institutions: might makes right. It is quite likely that the true source of the ineptitude of human organizations is the authoritarian governance model that seeks to concentrate decisions in a single, all-powerful leader.

Now, online communication has solved the bandwidth problem and can flood us instantaneously with massive amounts of sensory information and data. The problem is that our organizations don’t yet reflect this change. Instead of spreading decision-making down the chain of command to engage more neurons and deal with the decisions where the information is coming from, we are developing AI so we can continue to keep decision-making centralized.

To highlight the problem, it is worth studying how biological evolution has solved the same bandwidth problem in other species. Large colonies of social insects face the exact same conundrum of how to make decisions and allocate their resources. What makes this example intriguing is that a human brain and an ant colony can have roughly the same number of brain cells or neurons. An ant’s brain has 250,000 neurons, while a human brain has almost 100 billion neurons. In the ant colony, the neurons are just divided among more individuals.
As it turns out, an ant colony’s behavior is many orders of magnitude more intelligent than its smartest individual. An ant colony is capable of using most of its available neurons for decision-making, something that still eludes human organizations. The trick, it seems, is that there are no leaders, boardrooms or bureaucracy. The queen is in charge of reproduction only. All the decisions are made at the grassroots level–no pun intended.

How exactly does an ant colony know what to do, when and by whom? Simply by allowing each ant to respond directly to its environment. The most important information in their environment comes from all the other ants they encounter and the signals they produce.

Ants communicate primarily with chemical signals but also with physical gestures. They can produce up to 20 different pheromones and their various combinations to communicate. It is speculated that the way ants use these chemicals is reminiscent of the syntax of a human language. The chemical signals act as commands for the other ants that they instinctually follow. When a forager finds food, they will leave an uninterrupted chemical trail by dragging their abdomen on the ground. They also share food or exchange gestures by touching their antennae when they meet other ants to communicate what can be found at the other end of the trail.

When an African weaver ant worker encounters an enemy, it will spray a mixture of four different chemicals into the air to direct an attack. The first chemical directs others in her vicinity to be alert, the second to search for the enemy, the third to approach the enemy and the fourth to attack.

The commands that direct the behavior of the colony come from the very bottom of the organization, and every ant can have a say on what to do if they are in possession of new information. This is completely the opposite of how human organizations process information and issue commands.

Imagine if every decision an ant makes had to be processed and cleared by the queen or some middle manager using a tiny piece of paper. First, this bureaucracy would slow the activity of the nest down to a crawl–again, no pun intended–so that it probably would not even be able to defend itself. Second, the queen has no capability for rational thought with her 250,000 neurons and would be overwhelmed by the flood of signals coming from thousands of ants in the field.

With a system like this, ants would encounter the same bandwidth problem from which human organizations now suffer.

So what exactly can we learn from ants? Every citizen should have a powerful way of signaling and engaging other citizens when they know something important the others don’t. Language is not enough because it can be ignored. What would be the equivalent of these chemical signals in human society?

I put to you that it is money in the form of a UBI. Money is the information that acts as a direct command or request, compelling us to perform services for others. By granting every citizen 100 units a week to perform public services, every individual can issue local commands on how to fix the problems they encounter in their environment. If ants can do this, I think we should be able to do it, too.

By creating all money in the form of a UBI, we can dedicate the maximum number of neurons to allocating each monetary unit. Since each citizen is given 100 units for private consumption and 100 units for public expenditure per week, we can assume that every unit serves an important purpose and no units are wasted or otherwise misallocated.

How citizens spend their basic income should follow the same intelligent behavior loop. By observing their own needs and the changes in their environment, they seek out the best use of their money. Once they make their choice and spend their money, they observe how the environment responds to this action and adjust their behavior accordingly. If the results of their investment are satisfactory, they are likely to repeat it with the basic income they receive the next week. If, on the other hand, they are disappointed with the results, they will spend their money differently in the future.

This is intelligent behavior in practice. When every monetary unit leaves the hands of a citizen only after such judicious reflection, we can assume that the cumulative effect of a basic income-based monetary system becomes an expression of collective intelligence in practice.