Universal Basic Intelligence (UBIQ): Why AI Should Be Like Your Local Public School
Over the last few years, my work has increasingly sat at the intersection of strategy, design, and artificial intelligence.
Through The Helix Moment, my work at The Helix Lab, and now my writing on The Co-Intelligent Organisation, I've been exploring a common set of questions: How do organisations build capability with AI? How do leaders redesign workflows, services, and business models? And how do we create value through human-AI collaboration rather than simply automating existing ways of working?
Many readers will recognise these themes from my writing and client work across government, not-for-profits, and the private sector.
But behind all of these organisational questions sits a much larger one:
What does it mean to build a co-intelligent society?
If organisations are learning how to work alongside AI, then communities, institutions, and nations are facing the same challenge at a much broader scale. The conversation is not simply about productivity, regulation, or technology adoption. It is ultimately about agency, participation, and human flourishing in an age of machine intelligence.
Over the coming weeks, Jason Tabarias, Senior Director at the Centre for Public Impact (Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand), and I will explore these questions through a four-part series on AI and society.
Our first article introduces the idea of Universal Basic Intelligence (UBIQ).
Rather than treating AI primarily as a commercial opportunity, a regulatory challenge, or an instrument of geopolitical influence, we ask a different question:
What if AI were treated as a form of social infrastructure, designed to strengthen civic capability, collective agency, and human flourishing?
As we write in the article:
"The question for Australia is not whether AI arrives. The question is, what will we allow AI to do for us, with us and to us?"
And:
"A co-intelligent society is one in which human judgement, creativity, and local knowledge combine with machine capabilities to expand what communities can achieve together."
Read the full article:
Universal Basic Intelligence (UBIQ): Why AI Should Be Like Your Local Public School
