Please check out this collection on ScienceOpen on Hive Minds and Collective Intelligence

[Andy E Williams]

Your are invited to consider submitting your open access work to 'General Collective Intelligence Platforms and Hive Minds' a ScienceOpen collection of work: https://www.scienceopen.com/collection/hivemind

From a human-centric point of view, all technology and all computing, including decision-making platforms, solves one of two problems. These are optimizing outcomes for some individual(s) or entity(s), or optimizing outcomes for the group. Considering the “collective intelligence” of the group to represent the functioning of a “hive mind”, there is a "good" hive mind that optimizes collective outcomes, and there is a "bad" hive mind that might select a bad solution for everyone in the group in order to optimize outcomes for some specific individual(s) in the group. Either hive mind might also have super-intelligence, in which case it might have a greatly augmented ability to solve those problems, one of which might be augmenting capacity for discovery of either individually optimal or collectively optimal solutions. Wherever we lack a metric for optimum collective outcomes, it stands to reason that optimal collective outcomes can't reliably be achieved, and therefore where this is the case we are part of the "bad" hive mind. Current group decision-making, even when guided by collective intelligence platforms, implements the "bad" hive mind because unless the decision-making system has general problem-solving ability at the group level, and therefore has the ability to potentially solve every group problem in general in a way that optimizes collective outcomes, there will be some processes involved in any solutions to group problems that will be decided by individuals. Humans generally aren’t predisposed to take the risk of selecting new solutions, especially where those solutions are complex, even when they might be vastly better for the group, since humans aren’t most greatly motivated by the desire to succeed in the eyes of the group. Instead they’re most greatly motivated by the desire NOT TO FAIL, and the desire NOT TO BE SINGLED OUT by the group and ridiculed for that failure. Decision-making reliably chooses a new and complex solution that might be vastly better for the group in only a few cases. One is urgency, that is, when the group is “on fire” and the solution being offered is "water". Another is the case when selecting that solution will ensure a person won’t fail and won’t be singled out and ridiculed for that failure. Since the problem being solved by these decision-making processes is optimizing individual outcomes, and since such processes that can be co-opted in this way by some individual occur along the entire life-cycle of every technology, without a "good" hive mind to optimize all technologies and the processes involved in them, and to do so at the group level, every technology and every process involved in every technology is governed by individual optimization and therefore is moving us closer towards implementing the bad hive mind. This, in a nutshell, is the "technology gravity well" hypothesis. An example of this phenomenon is that even technologies such as web3 that are explicitly designed for decentralization, are in actual fact acting to accelerate the centralization of wealth, because rather than being designed in a way that optimizes outcomes for the group, they are in actual fact being inadvertently designed to serve the interests of platform designers and therefore are being designed to accumulate wealth on their behalf. Until we implement a "good" hive mind, we are being pulled by the advance of technology into a bad hive mind, with all of the"group think" and other negative attributes associated with it. Part of understanding how to implement a good hive mind is understanding the how the innate general collective intelligence factor of groups arises, as potentially described by the "collective social brain hypothesis".