How America’s 250th birthday turned into a test of AI-powered collective intelligence

Imagine being able to gather 250 people in a massive room and have them discuss and debate an important issue, arguing the points and counterpoints and converging on answers that accurately reflect their collective knowledge, wisdom, values ​​and sensibilities.

Now imagine you convened this debate on America 250^th birthday and asked 250 randomly selected Americans to come up with top three innovations that America has contributed to the world over the past 250 years. What would they come up with?

I know – it all sounds impossible.

After all, you can’t get more than a dozen people to have a productive conversation about anything. On a large scale, no one would get enough airtime to express their opinions or respond to others. This is why typical business meetings or focus groups never involve more than 8 to 10 people. Real-time thoughtful conversations just don’t scale.

To solve this, a new category of AI technology called “hypercommunication » greatly expands the size, scope and effectiveness of large-scale discussions. It uses specialized AI agents to connect groups in real time, allowing people to discuss and debate issues of all sizes. The goal is to enable hundreds or even thousands of participants to have thoughtful discussions where they can express their views and argue the merits of each issue.

I first wrote about this emerging technology in VentureBeat two years ago in an article about “Collective superintelligence.” In this piece, I explain how large human groups can be hyper-connected by AI agents in so many ways enhance the collective intelligence of the group. You can check out the science behind hypercommunication in the previous edition of VentureBeat. Here I focus on the debate between 250 Americans on America’s birthday.

To do this, I asked the Unanimous AI team to send a randomly selected group of at least 250 Americans (with a wide spread from every region of the country and a diverse mix of political and social demographics) and invite them to a twenty-minute online debate on a hypercommunication platform called Thinkscape which enables massively scalable discussion via text, voice or video.

After connecting, we asked the band to come out with the best three contributions what America has done to the world in the last 250 years – not a survey of opinions, but a discussion of ideas, arguments, evidence and reasoning. The group converged on a set of best answers that surprised me – but on reflection, they were reasonable and well-reasoned.

Before I get into the answers, let me show you what the debate looks like behind the scenes. There were 277 people, each discussing the issues with four or five people in parallel discussion spaces. It’s the magic a swarm of AI agents which connect all the small groups together in a real-time discussion. Here’s what it looks like at high speed:

In the debate above, the group of 277 people came up with 94 different ideas and then narrowed it down to a top 10, then a top 3. In the gif above, we’re simply charting the top ten ideas as they come up and vying 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 emerge to justify the answers. Here’s the group’s reasoning behind the « three best innovations » America has given the world in the past 250 years:

#1: Internet: « Our collective view is that America’s greatest contribution to the world over the past 250 years has been the Internet. It was born exclusively in the US through academic and government research and has scaled globally with profound impact. It has transformed communication, democratized information and education, enabled commerce, medicine, research and cultural exchange, and enhanced soft power and civic organizing. We have also acknowledged significant harms (misinformation, addiction, loss of privacy) and arguments that it is recent, global, or not uniquely American.

#2 Advances in Medicine: « Our collective view is that the United States has saved and extended hundreds of millions of lives around the world. American-developed vaccines have successfully eradicated or controlled once-deadly diseases, greatly extending life expectancy and enabling broader societal and technological progress. From major breakthroughs in cancer research and treatment to cutting-edge medical technologies that have revolutionized hospital safety and procedures, U.S. ingenuity has redefined healthcare. While the global spread of affordable medicines and vaccines has extended these benefits across borders, the US remains a leading medical destination where people from around the world travel to receive the most advanced treatments.”

#3: Spread of Democracy: « Our collective view is that one of America’s most significant global contributions is the nation’s system of government. The US has long demonstrated democracy in practice as an enduring global model. The US Constitution provided a vital blueprint for representative government, inspiring democratic movements and revolutions around the world while actively promoting human rights and individual liberties internationally. By empowering citizens with the fundamental power to vote and choose their own leaders, this framework served as a foundational framework for broader societal progress and directly helped establish thriving democracies around the world.”

It’s important to remember that this is 100% human intelligence — a pure reflection of the collective knowledge, wisdom, and values ​​of 277 randomly selected Americans. This is because the role of AI agents in a hypercommunication system is yes connect people do not replace them. Agents work to enable scaling human deliberation in which each participant is given an optimized ability to express their views, respond to others and converge on decisions based on their merits. Only the question remains – what should we ask next?

Louis Rosenberg from Stanford University, was a professor at California State University (Cal Poly), and received over 300 patents for his work in human-computer interaction, AI, and collective intelligence.

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