Imagine if you could gather 250 people in a huge room and have them discuss and debate an important topic, discussing the points and counterpoints, and converging on answers that accurately reflect their collective knowledge, wisdom, values, and sensibilities.
Now imagine that you called this debate on US 250th birthday and asked 250 randomly selected Americans to come up with the three main innovations that the United States has contributed to the world over the last 250 years. What would occur to them?
I know, this all sounds impossible.
After all, you can’t get more than a dozen people to have a productive conversation about any topic. On a large scale, no one would have enough airtime to express their views or respond to others. This is why typical business meetings or focus groups never have more than 8 to 10 people. Real-time thoughtful conversations just don’t scale.
To solve this, a new category of AI technology called “hypercommunication“is greatly expanding the size, scope and efficiency of large-scale deliberations. It uses AI Agents to connect groups in real time, allowing people discuss and debate topics at any scale. The goal is to enable hundreds or even thousands of participants to hold thoughtful discussions in which they can express their views and argue the merits of any topic.
I first wrote about this emerging technology on VentureBeat two years ago in an article on “Collective superintelligence.” In that article, I explain how AI agents can hyperconnect large groups of humans in ways that amplify the collective intelligence of the group. You can check out the science behind hypercommunication in the previous VentureBeat article. Here I am focusing on the debate among 250 Americans on America’s birthday.
To do this, I asked the Unanimous AI team to present a randomly selected group of at least 250 Americans (widely spread across all regions of the country and a diverse mix of political and social demographics) and invite them to a twenty-minute online discussion within a hypercommunication platform called Think about landscape enabling massively scalable discussion by text, voice or video.
Once connected, we asked the group to come up with the three main contributions what America has done to the world over the past 250 years: not a study of opinions, but a deliberation of ideas, arguments, evidence and reasoning. The group converged on a set of main answers that surprised me, but upon reflection, were sensible and well-reasoned.
Before I get into the answers, let me show you what the debate looks like behind the scenes. There were 277 people, each debating the topics with four or five other people in parallel discussion spaces. Magic is swarm of AI agents that connect all small groups into a single real-time deliberation. This is what it looks like at high speed:
In the previous debate, the group of 277 people came up with 94 different ideas and then reduced it to a top 10, then a the first 3. In the gif above, we simply plotted the top ten ideas as they emerged and fought for support during the live conversational debate.
The most interesting part of a great debate like this is not the answers, but the reasons that come up to justify the answers. Here is the group’s reasoning behind the “three major innovations” the United States has provided the world over the past 250 years:
#1: Internet: “Our collective perspective is that the United States’ greatest contribution to the world in the last 250 years is the Internet. It was born exclusively in the United States through academic and government research and expanded globally with profound impact. It transformed communication, democratized information and education, enabled commerce, medicine, research, and cultural exchange, and amplified soft power and civic organizing. We also recognized significant harms (misinformation, addiction, loss of privacy) and arguments that it is recent, global or not exclusively American.
#2 Advances in medicine: “Our collective perspective is that the United States has saved and prolonged hundreds of millions of lives around the world. American-developed vaccines have successfully eradicated or controlled previously deadly diseases, significantly extending life expectancy and enabling broader social and technological progress. From major advances in cancer research and treatment to cutting-edge medical technologies that have revolutionized hospital safety and procedures, American ingenuity has redefined healthcare. Ultimately, while the global spread of affordable medicines and vaccines has Expanding these benefits across borders, the United States continues to be a premier medical destination where people from around the world travel to receive the most advanced treatments.”
#3: Spread democracy: “Our collective perspective is that one of the United States’ most significant global contributions is the nation’s system of government. The United States has long demonstrated that democracy in practice is an enduring global model. The United States Constitution provided a vital model for representative government, inspiring democratic movements and revolutions around the world while actively promoting human rights and individual freedoms internationally. By granting citizens the fundamental power to vote and elect their own leaders, this framework has served as a foundational framework for advances. and has directly helped establish prosperous democracies around the world.
It’s important to remember that this is 100% human intelligence: a pure reflection of the collective knowledge, wisdom, and values of 277 randomly selected Americans. This is because the role of AI agents in a hypercommunication system is for connect people, do not replace them. Agents work to enable scalability. human deliberation in which each participant is provided with an optimized ability to express their views, respond to others and converge on solutions based on their merits. The only question left is: What should we ask next?
Luis Rosenberg He earned his PhD from Stanford University, was a professor at California State University (Cal Poly), and has obtained more than 300 patents for his work in human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and collective intelligence.
