Does Intelligence x Wholeness = Wisdom? (Artificial Super-Intelligence Part 1)

Would the development of autonomous, powerful super-intelligent AIs (ASI) automatically lead to disaster for humans – or to unprecedented wisdom – or to something else?  In an increasingly unpredictable world, what might help make life-serving outcomes from ASI more likely?  

I’m not the only one asking such questions, but I do bring a co-intelligence perspective into the conversation. Here’s a bit of background….

Back in the late 1980s my initial research centered on intelligence, especially collective intelligence.  I thought of intelligence as a capacity to generate evolving coherence between our “understanding” and “mental models”, on the one hand, and “reality” or “our environment”, on the other.  I saw intelligence – especially its learning function – as a resource to help us navigate, respond to, and improve our real lives. 

The smarter we were, the more our attitudes and actions fit with how the world really was, and therefore how successful we could be, individually and collectively.  If our understanding wasn’t well aligned with reality, we made mistakes and messes – at which point we ideally used our intelligence to learn from experience and correct our faulty understandings so we could be successful again. 

We also learned collectively through culture, collaboration, conversation, science, education, literature, databases, shared experience and more. That was collective intelligence.

Although this perspective on intelligence was oversimplified, I found it basically workable for many years. 

However, over time I’ve learned there are many different kinds of intelligence – reason, emotional intelligence, intuition, street smarts, and so on – each one especially useful for certain challenges.  I also realized that these diverse kinds of intelligence can be used together to generate even more effective forms of intelligence.

Furthermore, I realized that collaborative intelligence not only supports collective intelligence – e.g., by helping people work together on a problem – but also applies broadly to how we relate to life. In its broadest sense it can help us work “with” opponents (in Aikido), challenges (in crises), and life itself (in nature’s dynamics) as resourceful partners rather than ignoring them, exploiting them, or working against them. 

However, as a change agent, I mostly wanted to know how collective intelligence and its cousins could help us improve conditions in the world.

At first I thought it was obvious that they’d do that. But I soon learned that these different modes of intelligence could harm life just as well as make it better. 

For example, collective intelligence, collaborative intelligence, reason, and intuition, could all serve to regenerate – or degrade – a person, an idea, an innovation, or a landscape, depending on what we’re trying to do with them and how we use them. They can be used to design effective holocaust ovens or demolish communities – or to create better ways to green a desert or cure a disease. 

I concluded that what I was beginning to call “co-intelligence” – the combination of all of these forms of intelligence – needed to be somehow grounded in “the general welfare” or “the common good”. Even beyond that, I wanted it to serve the long-term well-being of all life.

That realization drew me to the principle of “wholeness” and “the well-being of the whole”.  I began talking about co-intelligence as intelligence that takes wholeness, interconnectedness and co-creativity seriously. 

This definition arose from learning more about how all things in the world are deeply interconnected – how they are mutually related to and involved with everything else.  It turns out that interconnectedness is a defining characteristic of complex systems – and is thus part of the underlying structure of life, itself.  Everything is playing co-creative roles in the whole of life and thus is implicated in the lives of all other parts of the whole.

So the kind of wholeness I became attracted to not only embraced the seamless unity of things, as understood by nondual mystics and quantum field scientists.  It also embraced the dance of diverse, interrelated, co-creative people and entities which together generate the dynamic wholeness of Life and Reality that we all live in together.

Most importantly (for a change agent like me) I saw that we could become more conscious of this dynamically interconnected, co-creative wholeness, learn more about it, and work with it to enhance aliveness, healing, health, functionality, spirit, well-being, meaning, and all the other dimensions of flourishing that make it good to be alive. 

This insight became the basis for the positive, life-enhancing bias of co-intelligence.  It suggests that our challenge as change agents and evolutionary agents is to align our individual and collective intelligence with The Whole – the wholeness of reality, the wholeness of life, the wholeness of situations, and our own fundamental wholeness as individuals and groups.  

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that it provides a practical way to apply wisdom in the real world.  My definition of wisdom became “intelligence that takes into account what’s needed for long-term broad benefit”. 

This way of describing wisdom is as flexible as it is practical.  It leaves open (a) what constitutes “benefit”, (b) how many diverse beings and life-systems would benefit, (c) how would current benefits impact the future (and vice versa), and (d) how long would such benefits last.  Yet with all that flexibility, this framing leans heavily towards broad, long-term benefits. And so this became central to my working definitions of both wisdom and co-intelligence.

I basically worked with these understandings of intelligence and wisdom for nearly three decades. 

And then along came AI….

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Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440

Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole

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