What
The Collective Intelligence Project (CIP) is an innovative incubator dedicated to developing new governance models for transformative technologies. It focuses on enhancing collective intelligence capabilities—decision-making technologies, processes, and institutions—to construct and cooperate towards shared goals.
Who
Founded by Divya Siddarth, previously political economist in Microsoft’s Office of the CTO and Saffron Huang, previously a Research Engineer at DeepMind.
Where & When
Launched in 2023, based in the US.
Why
CIP responds to the urgent need for governance models that can effectively manage the risks and harness the opportunities of transformative technologies. Traditional collective intelligence systems, such as capitalist markets and democratic institutions, have shown limitations in addressing global crises and coordinating complex values. With advancements in AI, blockchain, bioengineering, and automation, there is a critical need for improved decision-making processes and institutions that can direct technological development towards beneficial outcomes.
How
Key Principles
- Innovation in Governance: Developing new models for eliciting collective values and executing on shared goals, beyond the constraints of current democratic and market mechanisms.
- Participation, Safety, and Progress: Aiming to balance these three essential goals without compromising one for the others, challenging the transformative technology trilemma.
Functions
- Value Elicitation: Experimenting with liquid democracy, augmented discussion platforms, and consortia-based efforts to surface and combine group beliefs, goals, values, and preferences in a scalable manner.
- Remaking Technology Institutions: Creating hybrid funding models and organizational structures to execute on collective values in technology development and deployment, moving beyond traditional non-profit, VC-funded startup, or academic project models.
- Collaborative Ecosystem: Catalyzing an ecosystem of aligned governance research and development projects, working with a broad network of partners to pilot and implement new governance models.
Business Models
Hybrid philanthropic, public, and private funding