Humans developed this unique ability to cooperate in trust with each other in really large numbers. In families, companies, societies, or religions.

We are not unique in this space. Ants, bees, or other social species do the same, aggregating themselves in colonies of tens of thousands. Studies show that they can achieve this bottom-up, collective intelligence by deciphering a secret signature within their pheromones.

For example, if 2 ants have to go from A to B and one takes a shorter way than the other, the pheromones left behind by the first will lead the following ants into the shorter way. The more ants are passing through the shorter way the “deeper” their pheromones trail and the shorter way becomes the collective path. Like humans repeatedly leaving the trails on the easiest to take the path on a virgin grass field. The following to come will have an easier task.

Going more abstract, recent physics and mathematics theories like Hoffman’s Fitness Beats Truth (FBT) will say that each entity follows the shorter path to fitness. From a specie point of view, fitness is highly correlated with the capacity to communicate the shortest individual ways which will aggregate into a common behavior.

In human society, the very large scale of our cooperation is given by the fact that at some point in time we developed cognition and language. A unique ability to speak and leave trails not only on the grass but also on our minds. The neurons in the brain fire the same synapses until becoming thought.

First was used for small organizations sizes like tribes and using more sounds than words but in time we became more and more advanced in communication. The level of abstraction of the concepts moved between us also evolved.

And here is how we became a unique specie capable of organizing by the billions only based on purely fictional stories from our heads like countries, money, religion, or football.

By the way, science is advancing in some theories that this shift was (at least) sparkled by some mushrooms or other psychedelic plants some of our early ancestors consumed in their journey from Africa both to the left, to Europe and the Americas but also to the right in Asia and Australia. So maybe the plants are the ones organizing themselves through us, but let’s not go down this rabbit hole :)

So, the basic idea is that armed with this evolving cognition mechanism we could leave “cognitive traits” behind for others as in a “Rick and Morty” meets “Hansel and Gretel” episode.

And became so good at this since most of the planet was constantly upgrading itself as we reached a whooping 86% global literacy in 2019.

But the problem with literacy is the same as its virtue: being mostly a fictional “by-product” of our mind, it can function only as long as there is another “Observer” who acts as a Responsible because it has the full perspective and can Plan ahead and also, reiterate on the Planning if things are not moving collectively in the right direction.

Maybe not every individual can understand why they do what they do in their jobs, schools, economies, or whatever but for most, there is this idea that Somebody in the higher hierarchy has the full picture. Could be the boss, the Prime Minister, or Bill Gates. Could wish us well or not but at least they have a full picture and they know where we all go.

In my country, Romania, back in the ’80s, during the Communism Era you knew when applying for becoming a Civil Engineer how many sits are opened so you have to compete for let’s say 200 places. Because somebody from Ceausescu, down to the Ministry of Houses, down to the Ministry of Education down to the University of Construction calculated (good or bad) that the country needs 200 new engineers next year to build X square meters for the next 5–10 years. And usually, they could have failed by less than 20%.

Today, nobody knows in the world how many jobs we need in any of the domains. Not even China or other more centralized economies, because of our complex global interconnectedness. The more complex become the fabric of our interactions the more difficult it is to predict the outcome. Just like predicting the weather, a couple of days ahead and it becomes impossible. This is just a tiny example from education but you can extrapolate it to almost any industry, company, or country.

And this is not the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is that the above example is just a high-level example of limited cognition at top level. But the entire societal construction is made up of small fractals of the same game: where couples, families, teams, or companies plan their smaller collective future every day.

At the top end, most of the resources and time are directed toward internal communication and planning (any country, company, or large-scale organization uses most and increasing amounts of resources for planning). Because a country, a CEO or Papa cannot say they don’t get the big picture. Maybe the only collective body with a common agenda is Science but its function is rather a (very ) slow Sloth registering our consolidated scientific views.

At the bottom end, very few people even care about a collective agenda. It is difficult to manage yourself, let alone understand more complicated fabrics. Even if you are responsible and you dedicate time to understand the big picture, it is getting harder every day. People traditionally were not used to dealing with such massive amounts of new information. In most past lifetimes, the number of words and contexts used collectively didn’t change so much. Now, a new word comes into existence every 90 minutes within a more complex linguistic structure. As an observation here: in the need to bridge the incapacity of words to express the meanings of the words, emoji’s appeared recently.

Add here (1) a limited (by design) cognitive ability, (2) a shrinking attention, and (3) an evolving AI with its own private agenda trying to push the generation of these infinite amounts of data and there you have it: we become a society unconsciously self-generating the conditions for “If you can’t convince them, then confuse them”.This is the perfect ground for manipulation.

Not only the high-level manipulation (good or bad) at the very. It is the kind of chaotic, short-term manipulation of smaller and smaller entities with shorter and shorter sights. The modern version of the Tower of Babel.

In the past, Religion used to fill this gap because it came with a large-scale collective story that was easy to understand and exercised every day. Used as a North Star helped us to maintain the coherence of collective actions (good or bad). Times for Religion in its traditional sense have passed but the need for a global, collective (fictional) Story is the most needed, otherwise, our unique ability to cooperate in really large numbers will disappear. Or the number will decrease significantly.

Imagine how would it be if the entire Humanity’s cognitive power, elevated by the power of AI processes, would be coupled with an “Ant like” ability. For the moment we could only see these phantasies on separate images as in Sagrada Familia vs Ants House similarities.

But what if we could feel each other’s while exploring our individual journeys? Every emotion we find on that road: excitement, fear, joy will not be spoken but felt by each one of us. So the AI could come later in the process to materialize the thoughts.

Then we would use our Minds to project unique journeys while collectively choosing to follow the shorter ones. Instantaneously.