Deducing the Properties Required by General Collective Intelligence Platforms

A functional modeling approach is used to derive the properties that must be possessed by a platform with the capacity to significantly increase the general collective intelligence or c factor of groups. Such platforms have been termed “General Collective Intelligence” or GCI platforms. Having general problem-solving ability, a GCI potentially enables groups to execute any collective reasoning process, including abstracting (generalizing) a reasoning process so it might be reused in any other domain where it applies. A GCI can be shown to have the potential to exponentially increase the capacity of a group to create generalizations and other relationships, and capacity to store and exchange those relationships. Since relationships are concepts, and since the number of relationships between concepts better specify the location of any concept in conceptual space and therefore increases the density of conceptual space as a whole, GCI represents a phase change in collective cognition at which the collective conceptual space can expand exponentially in size and density. Each reasoning process connecting this far larger space of concepts has outcomes, making it potentially possible through these additional concepts to accumulate far greater impact on any outcome in the world. Because this phase change is not believed to have been possible at any point before in history, and is believed cannot occur again until the advent of another system with general problem-solving ability, such as a second order GCI or an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and because both AGI and second order GCI are believed to require GCI, GCI is proposed here to be the most important innovation in the history and immediate future of human civilization.