AI-powered collective intelligence tested with America's 250th birthday debate

Imagine bringing 250 people together to discuss and debate an important issue, arguing points and counterpoints, and converging on answers that accurately reflect their collective knowledge, wisdom, values, and sensibilities. Now imagine convening this debate on America's 250th birthday and asking 250 randomly selected Americans to come up with the top three innovations that America has contributed to the world over the last 250 years. This sounds impossible.

Typical business meetings or focus groups never have more than 8 to 10 people because thoughtful real-time conversations don't scale. But a new category of AI technology called "hyper-communication" is greatly expanding the size, scope, and efficiency of large-scale deliberations. It uses specialized AI agents to connect groups in real-time, allowing people to discuss and debate issues at any scale.

The goal is to enable hundreds or even thousands of participants to hold thoughtful discussions where they can express their views and argue the merits of any issue. I first wrote about this emerging technology two years ago in an article about "Collective Superintelligence." To test this technology, I asked the team at Unanimous AI to field a randomly selected group of at least 250 Americans and invite them to a twenty-minute online debate inside a hyper-communication platform called Thinkscape. The group was asked to come up with the top three contributions that America has made to the world over the last 250 years – not a survey of opinions, but deliberation of ideas, arguments, evidence, and reasoning.

The group converged on a set of top answers that were sensible and well-reasoned. There were 277 people, each debating with four or five other people in parallel discussion spaces. The AI agents connected all the small groups together into a single real-time deliberation.

The group came up with 94 different ideas and narrowed it down to a top 10, then a top 3. The top three innovations that America has given to the world over the last 250 years, according to the group, are: #1: The Internet: "Our collective perspective is that America's greatest contribution to the world over the past 250 years is the internet. It was born exclusively in the U.S.

through academic and government research and was scaled 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 acknowledged significant harms (misinformation, addiction, privacy loss) and arguments that it's recent, global, or not uniquely American." #2 Advances in medicine: "Our collective perspective is that the United States has saved and prolonged hundreds of millions of lives worldwide.

American-developed vaccines have successfully eradicated or controlled once-deadly diseases, significantly extending life expectancy and enabling broader societal and technological progress. From major breakthroughs in cancer research and treatments to cutting-edge medical technologies that have revolutionized hospital safety and procedures, U.S. ingenuity has redefined healthcare.