Imagine if you could bring 250 people together in a large room and have them discuss and debate an important issue, argue points and counter-points, and get answers that accurately reflect their full knowledge, wisdom, values, and emotions.
Now imagine that you called this argument 250 Americansth birthday and asked 250 randomly selected Americans to come up with three new top strategies that America has contributed to the world over the past 250 years. What would they come up with?
I know – this all sounds impossible.
After all, you can’t get more than a dozen people to have a productive conversation about anything. To a large extent, no one would get enough air time to express their views or respond to others. That’s why typical business meetings or focus groups don’t have more than 8 to 10 people. Real-time virtual conversations are not equal.
To solve this, a new class of AI technology is called “Hyper-communication” greatly increases the size, scope, and efficiency of large-scale conversations. It uses special AI agents to connect groups in real time, allowing people to discuss and discuss issues on any scale. The goal is to enable hundreds or thousands of participants to hold meaningful discussions where they can express their opinions and argue the merits of any issue.
I first wrote about this emerging technology on VentureBeat two years ago in an article about “Collective Superintelligence.” In that piece, I explain how large groups of people can be connected through AI agents in many ways increase the creativity of the group. You can check out the science behind hyper-communication in that previous VentureBeat piece. Here I focus on a conversation between 250 Americans on America’s birthday.
To do this, I asked the Unimous AI team to include a randomly selected group of at least 250 Americans (with a wide distribution from all regions of the country and a diverse political and social mix of people) and invite them to a twenty-minute online conversation within a large social network called. Thinkscape which allows for a much larger conversation via text, voice, or video.
Once connected, we asked the team to come up with top three offerings what America has done to the world in the last 250 years – not an opinion poll, but a discussion of ideas, arguments, evidence, and reasoning. The group came up with a set of top answers that surprised me – but on reflection, they were logical and well thought out.
Before getting into the answers, let me show you what the debate looks like behind the scenes. There were 277 people, each of them debating issues with four or five other people in the same discussion areas. That’s the magic AI agents which connects all the small groups together into one real-time chat. Here’s what it looks like at high speed:
In the discussion above, a group of 277 people came up with it 94 different opinions then reduced it to a Top 10, then a up 3. In the gif above, we simply organize the top ten ideas as they appear and vie for support during the live chat debate.
The most interesting part of a great debate like this is not the answers, but the reasons that arise to support the answers. Here are the ideas of the group behind the “three innovations” that America has given the world over the past 250 years:
#1: Internet: “Our collective view is that America’s greatest contribution to the world in the last 250 years is the Internet. It was born only in the US through academic and government research and has spread throughout the world to great effect. It has revolutionized communication, democratized knowledge and education, enabled commerce, medicine, research and cultural exchange, and increased soft power and social order that is harmful, harmful, harmful to society. loss) and arguments that it is recent, universal, or not only American.”
#2 Advances in medicine: “Our collective vision is that the United States has saved and extended hundreds of millions of lives around the world. Vaccines developed in America have successfully eradicated or controlled once fatal diseases, significantly increased life expectancy and allowed for widespread social and technological progress. From major breakthroughs in cancer research and treatment to cutting-edge health improvements in US hospitals, US hospitals have reinvented medical technology. Finally, while the distribution of drugs and vaccines affordability around the world extends these benefits across borders, the US remains a leading medical destination where people from all over the world travel to receive the most advanced treatments.
#3: Spreading democracy: “Our collective view is that one of America’s most important contributions to the world is its system of governance.” The US has long shown democracy as an enduring example around the world. as a basic framework for broader social development and directly helped to establish thriving democracies around the world.”
It’s important to remember, this is 100% human intelligence — a pure reflection of the accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and values of 277 randomly selected Americans. That’s because the role of AI agents in a hyper-communication system it is connect people, not in their place. Agents work to enable scaling human thinking where every participant is given an enhanced ability to express their ideas, respond to others, and converge on solutions based on their merits. The only question left is – what should we ask next?
Louis Rosenberg he received his PhD from Stanford University, was a professor at California State University (Cal Poly) and has been awarded more than 300 patents for his work in human-computer interaction, AI, and artificial intelligence.
