General Collective Intelligence as the Emerging Paradigm in Human-Centric Design for Sustainability

A recently developed framework for modelling cognition defines General Collective Intelligence or GCI as Collective Intelligence (CI) with general problem solving ability. Where CI uses the intelligence of crowds to optimize decision-making, a GCI must also optimize the choice of problem to solve. This framework represents a GCI as an adaptive problem solving system with problem solving segmented across a hierarchy of problem solving domains, one of which is adaptation through cooperation between functional components of the system. This domain defines how functionality is segmented across different components of a system in order to maximize outcomes, or in summary, balances centralization with decentralization. Where one function is more important to overall fitness than another, centralized cooperation prioritizes that function so that overall outcomes can be maximized. Decentralized cooperation maximizes outcomes for all participating components equally to remove the barriers that align decision-making with the interests of a subset of the group, which forces groups to solve the wrong problems. One such group problem is design and manufacturing for sustainability. Recent work has challenged the idea that process improvements will yield technologies with enough of an increase in efficiency to permit green growth while still reducing climate and other environmental impact. This paper proposes that designing all products and services according to the principles of GCI gives sufficient competitive advantage to businesses that cooperate to reduce consumption and increase sustainability, to make green growth not only possible but reliably achievable. This paper also provides an overview of what GCI based design and manufacturing of products and services for sustainability looks like. Leveraging GCI to achieve sustainability is explored as an example of biomimicry, and nature is shown to use the same approach to design living things. From this perspective, organisms are a collection of cells that cooperate to optimize functional designs according to well-defined principles in order to maximize the sustainability of the organism as a collective. Sustainability is represented as a mathematical pattern of stability implemented through these principles, a pattern which the 3.5 billion year history of the earth has thoroughly tested, and which therefore is robust enough to be replicated in all products and services, and once launched is stable enough as a pattern of cooperation to be sustainable in all organizations.