Collective intelligence

One distinguishing feature of human civilization is out ability to share information with each other and pass accumulated information across generations. Standing on the shoulders of giants has enabled the development of a huge body of knowledge and understanding that enables us to manipulate our environment in ways that no other species has achieved.

Information sharing, while central to our species' success, is nevertheless fairly crude and imperfect for two reasons. First language requires that knowledge be encoded and that encoding leads to a loss of fidelity in transmission. This is the flip side of tacit knowledge. Second, some people decide that sharing reduces their relative advantage on which resource appropriation depends. In other words keeping information to oneself and exploiting it leads to higher rewards than sharing it.

Recently there have been some luminaries in the IT world who have expressed the fear that machine intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence and at that point all bets are off.

My take is slightly different. It's not the power of single computers that presents a threat but their collective intelligence; computers have no qualms about sharing data, and data can be communicated losslessly between them. So even if they are individually less capable at the nodes, their ability to access collective information though the network and develop a collective intelligence (akin to "organizational intelligence" - see Jim March's writing) vastly outstrips ours. That is what I think should give is pause.

That leads to the question of societal organization; Keynes imagined a world 100 years from the time of his writing in 1930 in which machines did almost all the work and people lived lives of leisure. Yet that looks unlikely; more people are working and working at least as long as they did 100 years ago - his anticipated life of leisure seems a cruel joke.

If indeed machines do soon acquire the ability to performs not just repetitive manual task but a wide range of more complex cognitive tasks, the way we currently organize society looks untenable. 80% unemployment with the owners of capital benefiting from the machines' labors is a recipe for high social unrest and instability. So we may have to grapple with the issue of some transfer of wealth to provide for those who have been displaced - otherwise, we risk a society that looks rather like the middle ages with a handful of unimaginably wealthy barons enjoying the services of a huge number of serfs, living in abject poverty.

Some might say that with 45 million Americans already living on or below the poverty line, we are well on the way.