Are we ready to be smarter than our machines?

Today writing about intelligence is reckless, it sounds like an oxymoron in the phrase "human intelligence". Limited rationality, we would have said some time ago, submerged by personal constraints and collective limits. And that it is limited does not require botheringHerbert Simon, for having demonstrated what is known. Any choice made by a human being is marked by cognitive, knowledge and calculation capacity limits of the decision maker. Therefore, a first fact is that we are fully in a regime of limited intelligence. Let alone talking about increased intelligence!

And yet, in a time not too distant from the last millennium, the historianCarlo Cipollatried with great success and equal elegance to formulate onegeneral theory of human stupidity, in which he demonstrated how the numerical prevalence of stupid people within any complex organization, both licit and illicit, allows this group to operate with incredible coordination and effectiveness, albeit without rules, principles and guidance. The philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell also dealt with human stupidity, publishing over70short articles between1930and the1935in the famous American newspaperNew York American.

The doubt arises whether addressing the issue of organizational stupidity (which has a much greater impact on results) is more urgent than that of augmented intelligence. The hope remains that, in a collective dimension, some 'rare' trace of intelligence can be found and, therefore, it becomes necessary to amplify it, so that the community (even unorganised) benefits. The dilemma emerges of how "we limited people" can amplify something that we do not possess.

In the third millennium we have the privilege of being able to count onIntelligenceGenerative Artificial, about which we know too little, but which perhaps could help us capture and amplify the power of that dispersed natural intelligence to expand our creativity and help us find innovative solutions to humanity's problems. In short, a powerful ally against the dilution of natural intelligence, against the risk of seeing the latter replaced by improper and private uses of artificial intelligence. That's right: augmented intelligence representsa profitable alliancebetween two generative intelligences, one natural and one artificial, which necessarily express themselves on a collective level (it is, first of all, a problem of critical mass...).

And here we enter the territory ofcollective intelligence, today no longer represented exclusively by human contributions, but corroborated by artificial agents. Collective intelligence is not a sum of knowledge, but a multiplicative force that manifests its effects where there are conditions that allow the expression of natural intelligences: for this reason the organizationteam-basedis more effective and creative, resilient and adaptive and, if corroborated by Artificial Intelligence, is the most evident expression of augmented intelligence.

Until now, however, the attention of scholars and managers has focused on the management of the individual team. We know almost everything: the life cycle, the factors that influence productivity, behaviors, roles... but today organizations need to transpose the team model into the corporate dimension, to recover flexibility and coordination, guaranteeing effectiveness and efficiency. In short, rethinking the organization as a team of teams, where the minimal organizational unit is the group and the organization reproduces a structureteam-basedon different scales. Here, collective intelligence is called into play to ensure that the benefits of teamwork are reproduced at the aggregate level, where the interaction between natural intelligences, which supports productivity at the individual team level, becomes more difficult because it is mediated by hierarchies and power relations.Collective intelligence is therefore the condition that unites, mediates, reinforces, coordinates, aligns the convergent contributions of human and artificial agents, on a scale that goes beyond the size of the group and, in the end, returns a result greater than the sum of the contributions of the individual teams.

If therefore there is little natural intelligence in our organizations, we can certainly increase it with Artificial Intelligence, but then we are left with the problem of recombining these increased intelligences to obtain a result that is truly useful for the organization and for the stakeholders. And it is on this level that collective intelligence operates, the engine that expresses the power of a complex organization.

To truly understand intelligence we must observe the opposite: stupidity, and recognize that there is ample space for the application of increased idiocy and collective stupidity, of artificial and digital foolishness. From the comparison we will be able to draw useful ideas for freeing creativity and imagination, ingredients of extraordinary value because they are both rare and necessary for augmented intelligence to transform into fueled intelligence.