George Pór on wisdom-focused collaborative hybrid intelligence, AI whisperers, and AI shamans (AC Ep52)

“To use AI for omni-beneficial output, we need to bring to it our best qualities, which are beyond intelligence; it is wisdom.”

– George Pór

About George Pór

George Pór has been researching, teaching, and consulting in the arts and sciences of emergent collective intelligence since 1987, when he was introduced to the ideas by his mentor Doug Engelbart. He is the founder of numerous organizations, including Future HOW, Enlivening Edge, and Campus Evolve. His academic posts have included London School of Economics, INSEAD, UC Berkeley, Université de Paris, while his clients include European Commission, European Investment Bank, Ford, Greenpeace, Intel, Shell, Unilever, World Wildlife Foundation and many others.

Websites:

futurehow.site

ResearchGate Profile

www.riverflows.life

LinkedIn: George Pór

Medium: George Pór

What you will learn

• Exploring wisdom-focused collaborative hybrid intelligence
• Enhancing decision-making with high-quality AI prompts
• The role of AI whisperers and AI shamans
• Iterative interaction between humans and AI
• Balancing ethical considerations in AI use
• AI’s potential for community healing
• Promoting personal and collective growth through AI

Episode Resources

• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• ChatGPT
• Gregory Bateson
• Medium
• Generative Action Research
• AI Whisperer
• AI Shaman
• Prompt engineering
• AI-augmented human development
• Collective intelligence
• Vertical development
• Horizontal development
• Artificial General Intelligence
• Artificial superintelligence

Transcript

Ross Dawson: George, it is wonderful to have you on the show.

So, I’ve known of your work for a very long time. I think, you know, probably 20 years or so. And I think similarly, you for mine, but there’s been a lot of parallels. And recently you’ve been working on this idea of wisdom-focused, collaborative hybrid intelligence. That’s a very intriguing phrase. I think it goes to a lot of these ideas of amplifying cognition. So please, can you explain to us what this means wisdom-focused, collaborative hybrid intelligence?

George: Okay, let me just step back to give you a little context. For those last two years since I’ve been diving into AI, my driving question was, and still is, how can AI augment collective intelligence to serve better the flourishing of people, organizations, and the human species? So that’s the context from which wisdom guided and wisdom fostering collaborative hybrid intelligence comes. And so to get a sense of what I mean by wisdom-guided, collaborative hybrid intelligence, just think of that there are all of these zillions of organizations that prompt an AI agent to help with this or that aspect of decision making. The quality of that prompt has a huge impact on the AI’s output. Imagine if the articulation of the issue in the prompts would come from the deepest wisdom available to a decision-making individual or team. 

So what we are doing with AI in a meeting is analogous to what is happening in any good meeting. Even without AI, we are putting something out in the conversations, and individuals speaking, are contributing. And that becomes a prompt to the others to the other participants and brings back something from the others. So the quality of a team’s collective wisdom depends on the mindfulness and heartfulness of our utterances, plus the depth of our listening to each other in the field. So what I’m saying is that when the mind, heart, and action of speaking come into alignment, then that collective wisdom can guide our interaction with our AI mates. So that’s what I mean by wisdom-guided AI. So it’s not just putting out any prompts for hoping that AI will come back with something that makes our processes more efficient, yes, AI can do that, but the higher state, the uncatchable advantage comes from people bringing their best into the definition, the articulation of the prompt that goes to the AI agent. Now, the other aspect of this wisdom-focused AI is that it can be not only wisdom guided, but also wisdom fostering, and what I mean by that is that too, to catch up to the capacities that the benefits that AI can provide. We humans need to bring our best wave and if we do that, then what the AI’s output enables us is to tune in With the collective intelligence of the whole accumulated output of human knowledge. 

So, to catch up with that, we need to become more like AI whisperers, that is developing an intimate relationship with AI’s thinking. And that whole becoming wiser, for example, give you a specific example, like in one of our workshops, where we introduced this in our action research into the Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence, where we were not only talking about AI but actually used ChatGPT as one of the participants and Co-facilitator of the workshop. So how does it work? It’s like, I already use ChatGPT, in the design of the workshop by asking some questions that may come up with a better design. And then in the workshop itself, I asked all the participants to bring with them their favorite AI agent, because they will need to consult with them during the workshop to further the process of what we are doing. So they did, and the question was, one of the overarching questions of the whole workshop was, Can AI help us become wiser? When a participant asked that question from her ChatGPT, she got a pretty detailed answer. It responded with “Yes, I can,” then outlined in 5 or 6 points, the different ways in which it can contribute to making her a wiser person. When she asked the AI can I help you become wiser, the AI responded, yes, you can. And again, it outlined what kind of behavior, what qualities of prompts it expects that would help it give wiser responses. That was pretty cool. I found that just one example of “wisdom-focused,” of what it means why it it important. As I said earlier, we can just go for intelligence, but intelligence is neutral in that it has no values intelligence can be used for nefarious purposes, as well as for  benevolant, beneficial purposes. And to use AI for omni-beneficial output, we need to bring to it our best qualities which are beyond intelligence, it is wisdom. Does it make any sense to you what I’m talking about?

Ross: Absolutely. No, that’s fantastic. It was really, really inspiring. The mission, which you outlined at the very beginning of our conversation is extremely aligned with mine as well, I think, very strong alignment there. So there’s a lot to unpack there. And perhaps the starting point is to get very specific, you mentioned a number of times, specific prompts, and also the qualities of prompts. Would love to just get liked and pulled back a little bit to the, I suppose, ways in which we can be wiser through AI. But can you talk about some of the specific prompts or types of prompts or qualities or prompts that enable us to get to these kinds of wisdom? Supporting interactions?

George: Yes, like, if you take a situation, give me a situation in which you would use a prompt in a group setting. Then, I will share what its “wisdom-focused Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence” version would look like.

Ross: So, I mean, one example is in, you know, boards and executive teams, what I will do is to say, you know, this is the current conversation, this is what we have been discussing, what has not been discussed, what else important has not been discussed, that we can add to the conversation. So, that’s something that I might use in a facilitation context.

George: Beautiful, yes. These prompts already point in the direction of something wisdom related, because this domain is about looking at any situation, from a broader perspective. So, when you ask, what else is out there that was not discussed in this meeting? It points to the possibility that something is missing, that is broader.

Ross: There’s no, one of my favorite quotes ever is from Gregory Bateson, who said that wisdom comes from multiple perspectives. And that certainly informed my own thinking and outlook.

George: Exactly. Right, right. So, you can ask that question from everybody, and using a shared document like a Google Doc or whatever