We take advantage every day of our collective intelligence in order to keep pace with the evolution of a complex world, using the tools that civilization has built over thousands of years.
These tools allowed us to organize ever larger groups of people in ways that increasingly leverage their best abilities, instead of just ordering them what to do. There are today societies that explicitly aim to empower individuals to fulfill their potential, and design their life trajectory.
The limits of representative democracy are clear to many, and we have to keep trying to improve it. A candidate that emerged, not necessarily replacing it but offering alternatives that must not even be geographically defined, is the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). A DAO aims to use advanced consensus mechanisms to allocate resources, organize skills, achieve goals, and its potential is still to be fully explored, understood, let alone implemented. I believe that DAOs may represent the next stage of evolution of our collective intelligence.
Together with intelligence augmentation, centered on individual abilities, collective intelligence centered on what a community can achieve, represent two essential components of a future in which humanity will coexist with dignity, full participation and clear purpose with AIs.