Blog by Louis Rosenberg: “This begs the question — could large human groups deliberate in real-time with the efficiency of fish schools and quickly reach optimized decisions?
For years this goal seemed impossible. That’s because conversational deliberations have been shown to be most productive in small groups of 4 to 7 people and quickly degrade as groups grow larger. This is because the “airtime per person” gets progressively squeezed and the wait-time to respond to others steadily increases. By 12 to 15 people, the conversational dynamics change from thoughtful debate to a series of monologues that become increasingly disjointed. By 20 people, the dialog ceases to be a conversation at all. This problem seemed impenetrable until recent advances in Generative AI opened up new solutions.
The resulting technology is called Conversational Swarm Intelligence and it promises to allow groups of almost any size (200, 2000, or even 2 million people) to discuss complex problems in real-time and quickly converge on solutions with significantly amplified intelligence. The first step is to divide the population into small subgroups, each sized for thoughtful dialog. For example, a 1000-person group could be divided into 200 subgroups of 5, each routed into their own chat room or video conferencing session. Of course, this does not create a single unified conversation — it creates 200 parallel conversations…(More)”.
