General Collective Intelligence as the Emerging Paradigm in Human-Centric Design for Sustainability

Abstract

A recently developed framework for modelling cognition defines General Collective Intelligence or GCI as Collective Intelligence (CI) with general problem solving ability. Where CI uses the intelligence of crowds to optimize decision-making, a GCI must also optimize the choice of problem to solve. This framework represents a GCI as an adaptive problem solving system with problem solving segmented across a hierarchy of problem solving domains, one of which is adaptation through cooperation between functional components of the system. This domain defines how functionality is segmented across different components of a system in order to maximize outcomes, or in summary, balances centralization with decentralization. Where one function is more important to overall fitness than another, centralized cooperation prioritizes that function so that overall outcomes can be maximized. Decentralized cooperation maximizes outcomes for all participating components equally to remove the barriers that align decision-making with the interests of a subset of the group, which forces groups to solve the wrong problems. One such group problem is design and manufacturing for sustainability. Recent work has challenged the idea that process improvements will yield technologies with enough of an increase in efficiency to permit green growth while still reducing climate and other environmental impact. This paper proposes that designing all products and services according to the principles of GCI gives sufficient competitive advantage to businesses that cooperate to reduce consumption and increase sustainability, to make green growth not only possible but reliably achievable. This paper also provides an overview of what GCI based design and manufacturing of products and services for sustainability looks like. Leveraging GCI to achieve sustainability is explored as an example of biomimicry, and nature is shown to use the same approach to design living things. From this perspective, organisms are a collection of cells that cooperate to optimize functional designs according to well-defined principles in order to maximize the sustainability of the organism as a collective. Sustainability is represented as a mathematical pattern of stability implemented through these principles, a pattern which the 3.5 billion year history of the earth has thoroughly tested, and which therefore is robust enough to be replicated in all products and services, and once launched is stable enough as a pattern of cooperation to be sustainable in all organizations.

Using Models to Capture Patterns for Radically Increasing Social Impact

“…As a specific example of the "Change of Components in Cooperation" pattern, the conceptual case study of a healthcare value chain in the US showed the potential to increase collective outcomes (impact on access to affordable healthcare) by up to 40% through development of GCI based healthcare and health insurance platforms [6]. As a specific example of the "Change of Targeted Outcome and Components of Cooperation" pattern, the conceptual case study of a "Design for Change -Nairobi" sustainable housing design challenged showed the potential for an increase collective in outcomes (impact on access to affordable sustainable housing) by a significant enough margin to impact poverty [7]. This impact on sustainable housing is expected to occur through research into semantic representation of designs, where that research might be incorporated into a "Collaborative Design Platform" which facilitates collaboration between a massively larger number of designers to discover higher impact outcomes in a far larger region of solution design space [7].…”

Increasing the Societal Impact of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math with General Collective Intelligence

“…As a specific example of the "Change of Components in Cooperation" pattern, the conceptual case study of a healthcare value chain in the US showed the potential to increase collective outcomes (impact on access to affordable healthcare) through development of GCI based healthcare and health insurance platforms [16]. As a specific example of the "Change of Targeted Outcome and Components of Cooperation" pattern, the conceptual case study of a "Design for Change -Nairobi" sustainable housing design challenged showed the potential for an increase collective in outcomes (impact on access to affordable sustainable housing) by a significant enough margin to impact poverty through research into semantic representation of designs, where that research might be incorporated into a "Collaborative Design Platform" that facilitates collaboration between a massively larger number of designers to discover higher impact outcomes in a far larger region of solution space [13].…”

“…Patterns in the use of HCFM and GCI described in this paper (table 1) focus on significantly increasing societal impact for specific challenges that might be addressed through STEM [12], such as in civil engineering (sustainable housing) [13], computer science [15], health care informatics [16], and sustainable development [18]. Additional ongoing work continues to explore impacts in a wide range of of other disciplines.…”

“…Increasing Impact on Collective Outcomes through Deployment of Collectively Intelligent Chains of Cooperation (Solve Closed Problem with Closed Solution, that is, No New Products or Services) [18] Increasing Impact on Collective Outcomes through Development of New Collective Intelligence Based Products and Services Deployed in Collectively Intelligent Chains of Cooperation (Engineer New Products and/ or Services as an Open Solution to Solve a Closed Problem) [16] Increasing Impact on the SDGs through Collective Intelligence Based Research of New Technologies Incorporated in the Development of New Collective Intelligence Based Products and Services Deployed in Collectively Chains of Cooperation (Research New Technologies and Engineer New Products and/or Services as an Open Solution to Solve an Open Problem)[13] …”