Gianni Giacomelli on augmented collective intelligence, semantic spaces, network incentives, and designing superminds (AC Ep27)

About Gianni Giacomelli

Gianni Giacomelli is the Founder of Supermind.Design and Head of Design Innovation at MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence. He previously held a range of leadership roles in major organizations, most recently as Chief Innovation Officer at global professional services firm Genpact. He has written extensively for media and in scientific journals and is a frequent conference speaker.

Episode Resources

Karl Friston’s Free-energy Principle
Generative AI
AGI
Perplexity.ai
ChatGPT4
Jeopardy
Apple
MIT Ideator
Gates Foundation
Christensen’s disruptive innovation
‘Ikigai’

People

Thomas Malone
Marshall Kirkpatrick

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Gianni, it’s a delight to have you on the show.

Gianni Giacomelli: It is fantastic to be here. Thanks for having me.

Ross: So we have a shared passion for how AI can enhance our thinking. And, yeah, there’s many approaches Eureka mindset, you can have practices, you can have tools and techniques. So just the big frame, how should we go about thinking? Well, we have this wonderful, generative AI? How do we start by making it helping us to think better?

Gianni: I mean, it’s a big question. And it’s probably one of the defining questions as we start recording this at the beginning of 24. I’m gonna provide one view, which may be one of the many views but that mine is a little bit in depth to the work that I’ve done over the years with Thomas Malone at MIT at the Center for Collective Intelligence. And it’s the view of augmentation of collective intelligence; augmentation, meaning, not considering humans, just as a crowdsourcing exercise for machines as a set of technologies, but really the design the organizational design of the combination and the synergy between the two. And that sounds obvious to a bunch of people being exposed to many tools in the recent past, etc. But when you start peeling the onion and looking into how you really make it happen, both at an individual level, but even more importantly, at an organizational level, when you do processes that string together, people, that is actually a lot less obvious. And I think the first maybe the first answer to your question is we should actually try to step away and, and try to look at the forest, instead of just looking at the tree. 

And I think we got an obviously 2023. Everybody got engrossed with artificial intelligence, which in itself, the generative AI kind, is an exercise in collective intelligence. I mean, those machines were trained on us, right, we were trained on the things that the humans have been accumulating for many years. But if you look at them in isolation, I think we don’t get to where we want to get to. And obviously, a bunch of people talk about artificial general intelligence AGI, I really like to talk about ACI, which is augmented collective intelligence, which is a state in which we will design practices, processes, tools, that enable that synergy between large groups of humans, and large groups of machines. There’s a lot of design space there. And I think we’re gonna get to a place where we really can amplify our collective cognition, by doing that job right there, doing that job, almost a process and organizational design, using the technologies that we have now. And the practices that, by the way, by MIT colleagues and others in the world, we’re not being the ones, you’re the only ones. So we have a lot of those, and I think we can bring them to bear.

Ross: Absolutely. In an organization, hopefully, is collective intelligence is a bunch of people, you’ve got processes and communication to together, hopefully be somewhat collectively intelligent. But now we have these tools, which any of us within your organization can use, we can find ways to scale them and build them in processes. But to get to that collective intelligence, I think, you know, it’s very significant starting point is the individual, how can an individual augment themselves in a particular role? So I’d love to come back to two, I suppose, in a way end up how do we create that collective intelligence. But starting with an individual who’s working well, maybe entrepreneur and maybe working in an organization, they have, of course, access to generative AI in various guises. So what should they be doing, to start to think better, act better, and make better decisions?

Gianni: I think it’s a bunch of practical things. And we can get into the tools and the practices. And you know, we’ll get to that in a second. But I think the first thing that needs to be done is, is to change a little bit our frame of reference. I think most of us, especially in the West, but I think even in the East, in the recent times have been almost trained imprinted with this notion of, we need to be smart. Our brain is to be better. And obviously, we learn and we push ourselves and we apply a bunch of techniques and all that kind of stuff. But I think one of the things I have realized over the years and you know, I did my share of you know big jobs of being a Chief Innovation Officer in a large IT services company and such, but the more you think about it, and obviously the work on collective intelligence helped me with this is my brain, our brain is not what we’re just having our skull. 

Essentially, what we have in our skull is, is a catalyst is a is a point where a bunch of signals from the outside common mingle. If you think about the brain that way, then you think about the fact that in order to optimize the functioning and intelligence of the brain, you need to use all the ecosystem of things that exist around you. And we live in a time where we have access to information in a way that’s unprecedented. I mean, you and I, kind of same age, I guess, you know, imagine the remember when we were kids, right? I mean, we, at best, we will go to the library. And that was the way we had to augment our intelligence, and then we go to school, and then there’s teachers and pupils, and maybe we can work with each other. And now we have all this stuff around us. So I think the first point is really to think about your brain is not the neuro, you know, stuff that you have in your skull. 

And so the mind, the extended mind, I mean, it is not a philosophical concept is, you know, maybe we’re stepping into the practicality now, you have a bunch of steps to actually make yourself more intelligent, the moment you stop thinking that your brain is yours, right. So, I’ve done a lot of work over the years on how to do that. But I think there are at least four steps that people should take and may apply at an individual level, but also at an organizational level, but we’ll start with the individual. 

And the other thing that I suggest when when we do this is try to go obviously, for diversity. I mean, that could be and I work in academia, law, I mean, academics tend to be people who know a lot about very few things as a job. If you’re like most people, you will want to have a diversity of perspectives. I mean, the obvious example is, you know, Steve Jobs, who used to know a bunch of things about computer science, but also marketing and design and a bunch of things that ran through culture. So I mean, there’s all kinds of things I got to get. And so if you want to really become smart, try to deliberately find nodes, but also find nodes that push you into different dimensions spaces. Yeah, I found it for myself. You know, I work in software and consulting used to work at BCG at SAP, etc. And then I found at some point that this whole space of design that has its own techniques and methods and people and that really completely opened my mind. So this first thing to do.

Ross: I just wanna sneak in there. This echoes what you’re saying, because it very much echoes what’s on Thriving on Overload. This idea of find the right people and sources and information as inputs. This is cognition, cognition, human cognition, or any cognition is around, you got information going in, something happens. And then from that you have some, you hopefully, hopefully, you’ve useful actions. So can AI help us in what you’ve just described in identifying the nodes and in being able to ensure that those are sufficiently diverse? So are there specific techniques or approaches to do that? 

Gianni: Yeah. So first of all, the short answer is a resounding yes. And we haven’t seen anything yet. Right. So what we can do today, you can ask machines. I mean, a lot of AI has already been embedded in our search mechanisms for some time. I mean, if you search properly, if you know how to search properly, I know that you had Marshall Kirkpatrick for example, on your podcast a while back, you can actually find through simple algorithms, people