A failure of collective intelligence
Humans, individually, can be incredibly brilliant, but collectively we’re often puzzlingly stupid. To take a simple, uncontroversial example, we know that the tropical forests, the Amazon and the forests of South-East Asia, are the lungs of the world. Despite essentially universal agreement about this fact, we’re continuing to destroy them at an extraordinary rate in order to produce soy beans, beef, palm oil, and more. It seems that despite our intelligence and our astonishing global communication infrastructure, we’re collectively incapable of aligning what we know needs to happen with what we do.
There is a thought experiment about artificial intelligence known as ‘the paperclip maximiser’ – bear with me a moment, this is related to human sustainability and
