A few years ago, in a broadcast interview, the psychologist Wayne Dyer relayed that one of the most important lessons he had learned about fully healthy individuals came from Abraham Maslow’s study of self-actualizing people. According to Dyer, Maslow discovered that highly developed people have three key traits in common. First, they do not invest in particular outcomes. Thus, they do not get locked into fixed plans. Instead, they remain open to discovery and make real-time iterative adjustments as they learn new information, even if that means scraping their original plans.
Second, self-actualizers detach themselves from the good opinion of others. This trait allows self-actualizers to exhibit extraordinary courage in the face of intense social circumstances. Accordingly, they are able to resist peer pressure to conform and are less likely to fall into the trap of groupthink. Because they have a healthy developed sense of self and the ability to think both independently and more rationally, they are better able to perceive reality as it actually is rather than as they or others around them would prefer things to be. Because they have the capacity to think differently, they abhor ideological conformity and welcome a diversity of perspectives because they know that discovery of new knowledge can come from unusual places.
Finally, self-actualizers engage in power with rather than power over. Highly developed people understand that if humans want to be part of something that is truly powerful in making a difference in the world around them, they need to combine their strengths, learn together, work through differences, build a shared understanding that is greater than any one person could conceive, and freely agree to a course of action. When people engage in power with, they are participating in a radically different experience of power—collaborative power—where Lord Acton’s premise is no longer true. It turns out that it isn’t power that tends to corrupt, but rather coercive power. Collaborative power is not inherently corrupt because, unlike the top-down hierarchy where the elite few can arrange activities to optimize their own interests and crack down on those who think differently, in the peer-to-peer network the only way things get done is through a balancing of all interests and perspectives that is reflected in mutually acceptable agreements. Leaders who prefer power with to power over are not only more healthy themselves, they are also more likely to build healthy organizations for the people who work with them.
A More Rational and Human Model
In the next two decades, we are likely to witness an incredible leap in the capabilities of digital technology. Whether we use these capabilities to amplify power with or power over is the existential choice that will make all the difference is shaping what kind of world we live in.
The exponential growth of chips in everyday products as well as in our bodies will fuel the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT). While the IoT will create almost magical opportunities for practical convenience and facilitate earlier and better treatment of illnesses by giving healthcare practitioners real time access to the wealth of biological information within our bodies, these wonderous possibilities will also spawn new opportunities for abuse. The IoT will likely connect every person and every thing into a single network, resulting in a fully transparent system that knows everything about everyone. In the hands of an elite few with the ability to use coercive power to enforce ideological conformity and compliance, the IoT could spawn the development of the digital surveillance state. We are already seeing early warning indicators of this possibility with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) use of the IoT to observe citizen behavior and digitally calculate and store social credit scores that measure citizen’s compliance with the CCP’s acceptable norms. The more citizens conform with the behavioral preferences of the elite, the more social privileges they enjoy.
The threat of the surveillance state is not limited to communist regimes. The growing alliance among the globalist intellectual elite, Big Tech oligarchs, and government bureaucrats to use new technologies to support their version of a new world order is a real and present danger to democracies because the elite have a very low regard for citizens. Like the CCP, this alliance believes that the elites know best and they are incapable of embracing the notion that nobody is smarter than everybody as the organizing principle for building social systems.
Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) will catapult human knowledge by providing us with new capabilities to rapidly mine data and see patterns and make discoveries that are beyond the capacity of the single human brain. Whether this intelligence is used to enhance control over individual behavior in societies or to support individual freedom and provide high quality information for self-organized decision making will be an important dimension of the existential choice ahead of us.
The troublesome, sometimes tragic, flaw of building organizations around the principle of trusting authority is that the intelligence that is driving decision making is limited to the capacity of the single human brain. The more authoritarian the social system, the more likely decisions are being made by a single individual or a group of leaders who think as one because they have succumbed to groupthink. If AI is used to increase the coercive power of controlling leaders, the wondrous possibilities of digital intelligence will never be realized because they will be severely limited by the thinking capacity of the single human brain at the top of the pyramid. Instead, the unconscious biases and the myopic thinking of the people in charge will create the conditions where the Borg-like behavior depicted in the science fiction series Star Trek becomes an everyday reality. And if this happens, the inherent proclivity for top-down hierarchies to be irrational and inhuman will be greatly amplified in unprecedented and perhaps unimaginable ways.
The great potential of distributed peer-to-peer networks is that the intelligence in the system is not limited by the capacity of the single human brain. When the design principle of the social system is the notion that nobody is smarter than everybody, there is a recognition that all of us together are capable of achieving a level of intelligence that none of us could ever achieve alone. In other words, when we aggregate our collective intelligence, we are able to tap into a reservoir of brain power that often takes us far beyond the limitations of the single human brain and frees us from the unconscious biases of singular leaders.
A similar dynamic is possible for AI systems if they are designed to support the aggregation of collective intelligence rather than social control. If AI systems are designed to operate as distributed networks, they are likely to produce extraordinary intelligence because, with learning and discovery as their guiding principles, these systems will explore the full diversity of data, challenge accepted ways of thinking, recognize weak signals that portend possible developments, recognize new patterns that we have never seen before, and integrate the apparent anomalies in disparate data by leveraging the dynamics of collective intelligence to greatly expand our understanding of how the world works. Rather than using AI to advance ideological conformity, networks will use AI to produce new knowledge to inform the independent decision making of free members of societies.
If we are to live in a world that is more rational and human, we must stop the accelerating momentum of the elitist oligarchs who want to use technological innovation to control populations and solidify their vision of a new world order. While the elite may believe that they are advancing humanity by promoting the common good, the vast majority of us will experience the pernicious exercise of their coercive power for the tyranny that it truly is. It isn’t the common good that they will be serving, but rather their own biased interests because you can be sure that they will never give up the coercive power that they have amassed. Absolute coercive power does corrupt absolutely.
Creating a more rational and human world will not be easy because so many of us have little experience with working or living in peer-to-peer networked social systems. Few of us have ever experienced the higher level thinking of collective intelligence or the extraordinary performance of collaborative power. Most of us have never had the good fortune to work in a peer-to-peer network like Morning Star, Gore, or Buurtzorg, which we described in Part I. We may question whether the distributed network structure, which has been demonstrated to work over decades in a small number of companies, can be scaled to successfully manage the problems of complex societies. The answer is that we clearly can if we have the will to do so and if we are capable of making a major course correction.
Nobody Is Smarter Than Everybody
We know that networked social systems can be scaled because, if we step back and take a broader historical perspective, we will find that most democratic governments have been built around the design principle that nobody is smarter than everybody. That is why the foundation of democratic governments is popular elections. However, over the past century, democracies have been weakened by a force that did not exist when most of them were founded: the administrative state. For example, the constitution of the United States was crafted in the eighteenth century before bureaucracies became an everyday reality. The founders designed their government around three co-equal branches of government to assure that no one person or branch could amass dictatorial power. Because power was distributed, the governmental design favored collaborative power over coercive power.
Understandably, the founders could not anticipate that, in the nineteenth century, the Agrarian Age would give way to the Industrial Age and radically change social life as farmers became factory workers and the top-down bureaucratic organization became the dominant form of social organization, maturing in the twentieth century in the form of the modern corporation. Nor could the founders anticipate that, in the twentieth century, authoritarian bureaucracy would become an integral part of the government as the original four departments and their small staffs—State, Treasury, War (now Defense), and Attorney General—would morph into the fifteen departments and over four million federal employees that we have today. And the founders could have never anticipated and would be saddened to find the presence of, what is for all practical purposes, a fourth branch of government—the administrative state—with the wherewithal to bypass the separation of powers by having the authority to make regulations, enforce them, and even adjudicate them with their own corps of administrative law judges.
Perhaps the most important step in advancing the organizational design principle that nobody is smarter than everybody is for democratic countries to radically curb the coercive power that the administrative state has gradually amassed over recent decades. In the United States that means curtailing the ability of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats from using regulations as a vehicle for making new laws and restoring that task to the elected members of Congress.
Another step is to put an end to censorship by both Big Tech and the administrative state. The cornerstone of democracy is free speech. Without free speech, democracies crumble. Much like beauty, misinformation is in the eyes of the beholder. Too often what the administrative state and Big Tech label as misinformation is data-supported opinions that they either don’t like, don’t agree with, or find embarrasses them. The founders had it right. The best antidote for true misinformation is not censorship but more information. Without diversity of opinion, aggregating collective intelligence and cultivating collaborative power is not possible.
An Unconventional Peer-to-Peer System
As we approach the coming digital fork in the road, the difference between whether we create the most advanced form of totalitarianism or the most highly evolved human societies may very well depend upon whether or not we use blockchain as the systems architecture for both the IoT and AI.
Blockchain is the creation of an anonymous individual or group of individuals who, using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, published a short paper in 2009 that outlined an unconventional peer-to-peer system that allows users to directly transact business without the need for any intermediaries. The immutable distributed ledger system uses a network consensus to record and execute transactions. It’s best known as the platform for the Web currency Bitcoin.
The network consensus feature is an essential element of Nakamoto’s innovative decentralized system because it gives blockchain its most distinguishing characteristic: no single agent has the ability to execute control over system activity. This characteristic is game-changing because, if blockchain is used as the architecture for future systems, it would prevent governments from centrally surveilling its citizens and imposing social credit scores that can arbitrarily withhold basic individual rights or freezing the assets of people who disagree with a particular political ideology.
Understandably, this is a threat to corporate and government bureaucrats who seem to be intent on getting ahead of the blockchain revolution by capturing it to serve their own purposes. Recently, there has been increasing interest among the power elites in adopting digital currency systems and using blockchain as the platform for transforming centralized fiat currencies. However, those who are promoting this idea are only contemplating the immutable digital ledger functionality of blockchain and are discarding the consensus decision making that is at the heart of Nakamoto’s innovation. It is the consensus feature that is a threat to the elites because it transfers trust from individual authorities to the peer-to-peer system, which means that authoritarian bureaucrats would be unable to control individual access to assets with a digital click. The partial application of blockchain that is being considered by corporate and governmental elites is a major denigration of the original breakthrough architecture because it reverts the peer-to-peer network back to a centralized hierarchy.
A true blockchain consensus-based system would also prevent an elite group of Big Tech oligarchs from defining what is acceptable information and censoring the voices of those who see things differently. Instead, the decisions in a blockchain system would reflect the network consensus derived from the collective intelligence distributed throughout the system. No one agent would be able to exercise coercive power over anyone in the system. Decision making in networks would be a form of collective agency that reflects the consent and the agreement of the participants in the network.
If IoT and AI applications are built on blockchain platforms and use the collective agency of peer-to-peer networks rather than the individual agency of the elite few at the top of hierarchies to guide decision making, these new digital tools have the potential to revolutionize democracy and provide us with the building blocks we need to build social organizations that are more rational and more human.
While the long history of humanity has been a progressive evolution of more advanced technologies and civilizations, this human development has been marred at times by inhuman atrocities. Most of these atrocities can be traced to the manifestation of some form of human bias acted out in judgments or decisions made possible by the oppressive exercise of control that is an inherent hazard in hierarchical forms of social organization. We have the opportunity to create a very different and a much better future if we can make the choice to radically reform the fundamental way we structure ourselves in organizations, systems, and societies. One of the powerful benefits of collective intelligence structures is that, by effectively integrating all the various diverse perspectives, they essentially eliminate the wherewithal for single individuals to wrestle enough control to impose their individual biases on captive audiences. If we can transform social systems so that they amplify collaboration over control, we have the chance to build a better world.
Whether we like it or not, the development of the IoT and AI are inevitable. Whether these tools will be used to help us evolve into the higher reaches of human nature or to devolve into an advanced form of totalitarianism will depend upon us. In the next decade, we will be faced with what is perhaps the most existential choice in the history of human civilization. Will we continue down the road well traveled and incorporate these unprecedented possibilities to enhance the command and control capabilities of hierarchical organizations or will we choose the road less traveled and use these new tools to build a more healthy world? Hopefully it will be the later and we will be able to look back and say that has made all the difference.