Working with AI and all forms of co-intelligence

December 2024-January 2025 Fundraiser

I hope you are one of my readers who appreciates my work and will, for that reason, share a small contribution with the Co-Intelligence Institute to help us raise the $12,000 we need over the next five weeks. Since there are hundreds of you reading this, your help would make a difference! 

So far we’ve received $1443 from 24 people. That’s 12% of what we need from less than 1% of my subscribers. Please join them with a tax-deductible donation – but only if it would feel right to you, like making the world a whole lot better for people born exactly 50 years from now….

Thanks for considering this request – and blessings on your support for Life in all the ways you do that – and on the Immense Journey we’re all on together!

Coheartedly,
Tom

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Working with AI and all forms of co-intelligence

Dear friends,

The most popular co-intelligence book on the planet right now is Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI.  His title tells you what he means by the word “co-intelligence”.

I own a copy of his book, which I’ve read and valued.  I admire his work tremendously and subscribe to his newsletter, which I recommend to you if you are interested in generative AI.

Mollick was also the inspiration for getting my own book on co-intelligence published in March 2024: Co-Intelligence:  The Applied Wisdom of Wholeness, Interconnectedness, and Co-Creativity. My book’s title tells you a lot about how my ideas about co-intelligence differ from his.

I view his co-intelligence – a working partnership between human and artificial intelligence – as one form of what I call COLLABORATIVE INTELLIGENCE (which is, in turn, a facet of my broader understanding of co-intelligence).  

But I explore other forms of collaborative intelligence, as well – including 

• working well with other people (especially people who are different from us)… 
• working well with other life forms and living systems…. 
• working well with the energies and elements within a given scene or situation… and 
• working well even with psychosocial fields and spiritual realms.  

I suggest that if we’re going to be working well with AI, we’d better be working well with each other, with situations, with nature, and with the Spirit of Life… or we’ll be getting into big trouble, thanks to AI’s considerable powers and limitations.

Mollick’s idea of co-intelligence also touches on the concept of COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE (which I adopted from business consultants in the 1990s).  Collective intelligence usually refers to many people’s intelligences interacting in contexts that enable a whole group, organization or community to act in an intelligent manner, responding well to its collective challenges.  We see this especially when people are working well together (i.e., when collaborative intelligence is also present).  

Collective intelligence theory suggests that if we add AI into this mix – especially if we add diverse AIs into interactions with diverse people – we get a particularly potent combination.  George Por is consciously experimenting with this.

Mollick’s idea of co-intelligence provides a rich realm for new theory and practice. But his limited focus on collaborative and collective intelligence also marks a significant boundary between his vision of co-intelligence and mine – a boundary that begs for bridging and synergy.  

Here’s what’s outside of his frame of reference that’s fundamental to mine.

I identify four additional enhanced forms of intelligence – multimodal intelligence, resonant intelligence, universal intelligence and wisdom.  I believe we need to appreciate and use ALL these forms of intelligence.  I believe they’re each precious in their own right AND that, using them together will enable us to make our growing power and intelligence – including AI – more benign.

Here are some initial thoughts about these additional four forms of co-intelligence.

* MULTIMODAL INTELLIGENCE is epitomized by the idea that Western society’s glorification of reason, fact, mathematical and verbal capacities and engineering skills are limited – even dangerous – to the extent they are exercised in the absence of “softer” intelligences like intuition, empathy, compassion, imagination, spiritual and moral intelligence and bodily/somatic intelligence.  

Of course, the opposite is also true: All those soft forms of intelligence can prove problematic when we ignore facts and logic.  We’ve seen plenty of that!

ALL our various modes of intelligence can add important value to each other.  Not only can they synergize, but they can also help restrain any one-sided intelligence from going too far, colonizing our overall intelligence. We see the importance of this in various historic catastrophes generated by the destructive use of religion, on the one hand, and science on the other.  The power of AI also needs internal checks and balances.

Closely related to these considerations we find the other three manifestations of co-intelligence – wisdom, resonant intelligence and universal intelligence. These, especially, have direct roots in wholeness and its corollaries like wholesomeness, health, holiness, holism and integrity.  

*  WISDOM involves seeking – and to some extent achieving – full and practical wellbeing for all involved, including all forms of life and living systems, now and especially long into the future.  Wisdom seeks to take the whole into account in both the benefits and the beneficiaries of any action. In our particular challenge – the metacrisis – wisdom would constrain the use of AI wherever it would intensify the systemic drivers of collapse.

*  RESONANT INTELLIGENCE involves the capacity to experience and generate energetic or empathic connection and shared experience between people or among living entities and collectives of all kinds. It dissolves seemingly solid boundaries between entities – from adversaries to species to living and non-living things – shifting them into deep interrelatedness and the wholeness of our communal being, doing and having, what I call our “core commons”.  How can we help AI help us to ground ourselves in this deep common ground?

*  UNIVERSAL INTELLIGENCE involves our capacity to tap into, align with and use the primordial greater-than-human intelligences at work in nature, evolution, psycho-spiritual realms, and complex reality in general. Universal intelligence invites our merger with the vast dynamics of evolving wholeness, of which our human intelligence is both a part and an expression.  We need to help AI help us evolve into and operate out of that understanding of who we are, embedded in truly vast forms of more-than-human intelligence.

Our efforts to live and work well with AI can empower us and be empowered by our efforts to advance all forms of collaborative and collective intelligence. And those efforts can, in turn, be restrained and channeled into more sensibly secure pathways by weaving AI more fully into our multimodal intelligence and wisdom, and training it to prioritize resonance with and as the holistic creative responsiveness of the greater-than-human world.

We need that.  And we need folks like Ethan Mollick to help us do it – with and beyond the growing capacities of generative AI.

Coheartedly,

Tom

PS:  This integration of AI-based co-intelligence with wholeness-based co-intelligence naturally involves addressing the currently externalized harms of AI use, including not only its amplification of the systemic drivers of collapse noted above and obvious risks of dependence, but its extravagant impacts on energy, water and landscapes as well as on the livelihoods of millions of people.  In virtually all these cases, radical transformation of the structures, assumptions and incentives of modern civilization are very likely called for, a process which could be greatly facilitated by the increasing integration of all forms of co-intelligence. So I see it as a virtuous spiral of evolution and learning, to be intentionally undertaken sooner rather than later.

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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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