Co-Intelligence: The Future of Intelligence Is Collective

In the series Jason Tabarias from CPI and I are writing about what are the ways we can thinking about AI for society in the Australian context, here is the third installment.

For much of the public conversation, artificial intelligence has been framed as a contest. Humans versus machines. Workers versus automation. Human creativity versus algorithmic production. 

Whether this contest is framed in optimism or fear, the underlying assumption is largely the same: intelligence is a zero-sum game. As machine intelligence becomes more capable, human intelligence must become less important. 

We think this frame is wrong. 

The future is not human intelligence competing against artificial intelligence. It is co-intelligence: diverse forms of human intelligence working with machine intelligence to expand what people and communities can imagine, understand, and achieve together. 

This changes the central question facing Australia. 

Rather than asking only how intelligent machines will become, we should also ask: how intelligent, wise and capable could our society become because of them? 

In the first two articles in this series, we argued that artificial intelligence should be understood as a new form of social infrastructure, and that access to this infrastructure alone is not enough. What matters is agency: whether people and communities can understand it, shape it, and use it for purposes they determine themselves. 

Co-intelligence is what that agency looks like in practice.

Article here - https://centreforpublicimpact.org/resource-hub/co-intelligence-the-future-of-intelligence-is-collective/