Coordinated human action as example of superhuman intelligence

2022-09-21T07:37:40+00:00

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+ ====== Coordinated human action as example of superhuman intelligence ======
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+ // Published 21 January, 2016; last updated 27 December, 2017 //
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+ <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Collections of humans organized into groups and institutions provide many historical examples of the creation and attempted control of intelligences that routinely outperform individual humans. A preliminary look at the available evidence suggests that individuals are often cognitively outperformed in head-to-head competition with groups of similar average intelligence. This article surveys considerations relevant to the topic and lays out what a plausible research agenda in this area might look like.</span></p>
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+ 
+ 
+ ===== Background =====
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+ <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Humans are often organized into groups in order to perform tasks beyond the abilities of any single human in the group. Many such groups perform cognitive tasks. The history of forming such groups is long and varied, and provides some evidence about what new forms of superhuman intelligence might be like.</span></p>
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+ 
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+ <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Some examples of humans cooperating on a cognitive task that no one member could perform include:</span></p>
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+ <ul>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ten therapists can see ten times as many patients as one therapist can.</span></div></li>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">A hospital can perform many more kinds of medical procedure and treat many more kinds of illness than any one person in the hospital.</span></div></li>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">A team of friends on trivia night might be able to answer more questions than any one of them individually might.</span></div></li>
+ </ul>
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+ <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">How such institutions are formed, and the sensitivity of their behavior to starting conditions, may help us predict the behavior of similarly constituted AIs or systems of AIs. This information would be especially useful if control or value alignment problems have been solved in some cases, or to the extent that existing human institutions resemble superintelligences or constitute an intelligence explosion.</span></p>
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+ <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">There are several reasons these kinds of groups may present only a limited analogy to digital artificial intelligence. For instance, humans have no software-hardware distinction, so physical measures such as fences that can control the spread of humans are not likely to be as reliable at controlling the spread of digital intelligences. An individual human cannot easily be separated into different cognitive modules, which limits the design flexibility of intelligences constructed from humans. More generally, AIs may be programmed in ways very different from the heuristics and algorithms executed by the human brain, so while human organizations may be a kind of superhuman intelligence, they are not necessarily representative of the broader space of possible superintelligences.</span></p>
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+ 
+ 
+ ==== Questions for further investigation: ====
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+ 
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+ <ul>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Do any human organizations have the characteristics of superintelligences that some AI researchers and futurists expect to cause an intelligence explosion with catastrophic consequences? If so, do we expect catastrophe from human organizations? If not, what distinguishes them from other, potential artificial intelligences?</span></div></li>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How similar is the problem of controlling institutional behavior to the value alignment problem with respect to powerful digital AIs? Are the expected consequences similar?</span></div></li>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Do control mechanisms require limiting the cognitive performance of groups, or are there control mechanisms that do not appear to degrade in effectiveness as the intelligence of the group increases?</span></div></li>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How relevant are the differences between human collective intelligence and digital AI?</span></div></li>
+ </ul>
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+ 
+ 
+ ===== Group vs individual performance =====
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+ 
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+ <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Institutions are mainly relevant as an example of constructed intelligence if their intelligence is higher than that of humans, in some sense. This section examines reasons to believe this might be the case.</span></p>
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+ 
+ 
+ ==== Mechanisms for cognitive superiority of groups ====
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+ <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We can think of several mechanisms by which a group might outperform individual humans on cognitive tasks, although this list is not comprehensive:</span></p>
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+ <ul>
+ <li><div class="li">
+ <b>Aggregation</b> <span style="font-weight: 400;">– A large number of people can often perform cognitive tasks at a higher rate than a single person performing the same tasks. For example, a large accounting firm ought to be able to perform more audits, or prepare more tax returns, than a single accountant. In practice, there are often impediments to work scaling linearly with the number of people involved, as noted in observations such as</span> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Parkinson’s Law</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span>
+ </div></li>
+ <li><div class="li">
+ <b>Cognitive economies of scale</b>
+ <ul>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">It is often less costly to teach someone how to perform a task than for them to figure it out on their own. Knowledge transfer between members of a group may therefore accelerate the learning process.</span></div></li>
+ <li><div class="li">
+ <span style="font-weight: 400;">Individuals with different skills can cooperate to produce things or quantities of things that no one person could have produced, through specialization and gains from trade. For example,</span> <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">I, Pencil</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">describes the large number of processes, each requiring a very different set of skills and procedures that it would take a long time to learn, to produce a single pencil.</span>
+ </div></li>
+ </ul>
+ </div></li>
+ </ul>
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+ 
+ 
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+ <ul>
+ <li><div class="li">
+ <b>Model combination and adjustment</b>
+ <ul>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">In groups solving problems, people can make different suggestions and identify one another’s incorrect suggestions, which may help the group avoid wasting time on blind alleys or adopting premature, incorrect solutions.</span></div></li>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The average of the individual estimates from a group of people is typically more reliably accurate than the estimate of any individual in the group, because random errors tend to cancel each other out. This is often called the “wisdom of crowds”.</span></div></li>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Groups of people can also coordinate by comparing predictions and accepting the claim the group finds most credible. Trivia teams typically use this strategy. Groups of people have also been pitted against individuals in chess games.</span></div></li>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Markets can be used to combine information from many individuals.</span></div></li>
+ </ul>
+ </div></li>
+ </ul>
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+ 
+ 
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+ <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Further investigation on this topic could include:</span></p>
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+ 
+ 
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+ <ul>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Generating a more comprehensive list of potential mechanisms by which institutions and groups may have a cognitive advantage, by examining the historical record, arguments, and experimental and case studies of individual vs group performance.</span></div></li>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Assessing which mechanisms can be shown to work, and how much group intelligence can exceed individual intelligence, by evaluating historical examples, case studies, and experimental studies.</span></div></li>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Assessing in which aspects of intelligence, if any, groups have not outperformed individuals.</span></div></li>
+ </ul>
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+ 
+ 
+ ==== Evidence of cognitive superiority of groups ====
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+ 
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+ <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">An incomplete survey of literature on collective intelligence found several measures where group performance, distinct from individual performance, has been explicitly evaluated:</span></p>
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+ 
+ 
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+ <ul>
+ <li><div class="li">
+ <a href="http://www.sebbm.es/archivos_tinymce/woolley2010.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Wooley et al. 2010</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">examined the performance of groups on tasks such as solving visual puzzles, brainstorming, making collective moral judgments, negotiating over limited resources, and playing checkers against a standardized computer opponent. The study found correlation between performance on different tasks, related more to the ability of members to coordinate than to the average or maximum intelligence of group members.</span>
+ </div></li>
+ <li><div class="li">
+ <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/1415351?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Shaw 1932</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">compared the timed performance of individuals and four-person groups on simple spatial and logical reasoning problems, and verbal tasks (arranging a set of words to form the end of some text). The study found that on problems where anyone was able to solve them, groups substantially outperformed individuals, mostly by succeeding much more often than individuals did. No one was able to solve the last two problems, but the study did find that on those problems, suggestions rejected during the process of group problem-solving were predominantly incorrect suggestions rejected by someone other than the person who proposed them, which shows error-correction to be potentially an important part of the advantage of group cognition.</span>
+ </div></li>
+ <li><div class="li">
+ <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/abn/33/3/409/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thorndike 1938</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">compared group and individual performance on vocabulary completion, limerick completion, and solving and making cross-word puzzle tests. Groups outperformed individuals on everything except making crossword puzzles.</span>
+ </div></li>
+ <li><div class="li">
+ <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xge/44/5/360/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Taylor and Faust 1952</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">tested the ability of individuals, groups of two, and groups of four, to solve “twenty questions” style problems. Groups outperformed individuals, but larger groups did not outperform smaller groups.</span>
+ </div></li>
+ <li><div class="li">
+ <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00223980.1937.9917512?journalCode=vjrl20&amp;#.VpwKGFMrKAw"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gurnee 1936</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">compared individual and group performance at maze learning. Groups completed mazes faster and with fewer false moves.</span>
+ </div></li>
+ <li><div class="li">
+ <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xge/7/5/398/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gordon 1924</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">compared individual estimates of an object’s weight with the average of members of a group. The study found that group averages outperformed individual estimates, and that larger groups performed better than smaller groups.</span>
+ </div></li>
+ <li><div class="li">
+ <a href="http://crx.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/09/29/0093650215607627.abstract"><span style="font-weight: 400;">McHaney et al. 2015</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">compared the performance of individuals, ad hoc groups, and groups with a prior history of working together, at detecting deception. The study found that groups with a prior history of working together outperform ad hoc groups, and refers to earlier literature that found no difference between the performance of individuals and that of ad hoc groups.</span>
+ </div></li>
+ </ul>
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+ 
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+ <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mostly these studies appear to show groups outperforming individuals. We also found review articles referencing tens of other studies. We may follow up with a more comprehensive review of the evidence in this area in the future.</span></p>
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+ 
+ 
+ ==== Questions for further investigation: ====
+ 
+ 
+ <HTML>
+ <ul>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Which of the possible mechanisms for cognitive superiority of groups</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> do human institutions demonstrate in practice? Do they have important advantages other than the ones enumerated?</span></div></li>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">In what contexts has the difference between group and individual performance been measured? Are there measures on which large organizations do much better than a single human? On what kinds of tasks does group performance most exceed that of individuals? How are these groups constituted?</span></div></li>
+ <li><div class="li"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Are there measures on which large organizations cannot be arbitrarily better than a single human? (These might still be things that an AI could do much better, and so where organizations are not a good analogue.) Are there measures for which large organizations have not yet even reached human level intelligence? (It is deprecatory to say something was “written by a committee.”)</span></div></li>
+ </ul>
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+ 
+

Examples of early action on risks

2022-11-02T18:31:12+00:00

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  <p>We think this is a moderately good example.</p>
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+ ==== Related ====
  
+ [[featured_articles:preliminary_survey_of_prescient_actions|Preliminary survey of prescient actions]]
  
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+ ==== Notes ====
  
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  <ol class="easy-footnotes-wrapper">
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AI Impacts Wiki ai_control

Coordinated human action as example of superhuman intelligence

Examples of early action on risks