General Collective Intelligence and the Transition to Collective Super-Intelligence

General Collective Intelligence has been defined as a system that combines individuals into a single collective cognition with the potential for vastly greater intelligence than any individual in the group [1], [2]. A novel Human Centric Functional Modeling approach [3] has been used define a model for this collective cognition, and for individual cognition [4], as well as for the intelligence of those systems of cognition, in order to quantify this potential increase in intelligence as exponential. Where other approaches assume the functions of cognition are implemented through mechanisms that are not yet confirmed, these functional models are defined from first principles and simply reflect all observed functionality rather than assuming any implementation at all. Here we show that from the perspective of these functional models, the transition from animal intelligence to a human intelligence capable of a sufficient level of abstraction to develop science and other concepts, and capable of exchanging and accumulating the value of those abstractions to achieve exponentially greater impact on the external world, is a well-defined phase change [5]. The transition from human intelligence to GCI, the transition from GCI to second order GCI, and so forth to Nth order GCI are hypothesized to be subsequent phase changes that may or may not occur [5]. The functional modeling approach is used to clarify the fundamentally different nature of the general problem-solving ability provided by GCI as opposed to the problem solving ability of tools such as computation or computing methods [6] that can be applied to any general problem, and why even super computers without general problem-solving ability are limited to the problems their designers can define, and to the solutions those designers can envision [7]. This model suggests that entire categories of problems cannot reliably be solved without this phase change to General Collective Intelligence, and since this exponential increase in problem-solving ability applies to physics, mathematics, economics, health care, sustainable development, and every other field of human study where intelligence applies. In addition, since this model suggests that any exponential increase in ability to impact the external world possible through GCI cannot have been possible before at any time in human civilization, and since another such increase cannot be possible again until the advent of AGI or the transition to a second order GCI. the implications of GCI are profound [8].