Common Good AI
Building common ground for the common good
Every day, we hear about AI in news headlines, social media, and conversations. It is constantly bubbling under the surface: the newest technology that will change our lives.
We hear about its potential to increase productivity and efficiency. We also hear about its risks automating jobs or disrupting elections or worse.
At the same time, in those same news headlines, we see greater threats to social cohesion and democracy. There is a deepening polarization fostered by social media. There is a breakdown of civil discourse and disillusionment with the U.S. political system. People feel less agency to shape decisions that affect them.
In the current climate, it can be hard to have a conversation with a neighbor who has a different perspective on a controversial topic.
We need to shift these dynamics.
We need new tools to discover shared values and co-create solutions.
In this current political climate, imagine if we could use AI technology to bring citizens together at scale to collaborate and find solutions to problems in their community. For example, we could ask:
What will improve access to essential health care for families?
How can we decrease gun violence in our schools to make them safer?
What will address homelessness in our city?
How does our neighborhood need to adapt due to climate change?
What projects do you want the city or state to fund?
We need tools that build alignment across diverse groups to generate meaningful change.
Common Good AI is a new non-profit organization that leverages human abilities to innovate and find solutions by integrating AI to empower groups of any size to collaboratively ideate, debate diverse ideas, identify shared goals, and find a path forward together.
Leveraging the technology, people can:
Discover the values that bring us together
Create a collaborative conversation to identify ideas to solve problems
Build shared understanding of what actions will have the greatest possible impact
Common Good AI is partnering with academics, foundations, non-profits, and organizations scaling human collaboration. Its immediate goal is to identify entry points to rigorously pilot its existing AI platform to promote inclusive community-level engagement within wider democratic processes.
Programming could include local problem solving, advocacy agenda setting, urban planning, raising political voice to elected officials, and more.
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Our vision is for humanity to collaborate and co-create breakthrough solutions at scale using AI technology to harness our innate collective intelligence.
Our mission is to foster inclusive civic engagement by transforming how communities find common ground and solve problems together.
Our values
Community
Collaboration
Inclusive
Innovation
We invite you to join us.
Example initiatives
Engaging empowered citizens
Citizens in a mid-size city in the South engaged in a discussion of local issues with a focus on ideas over identity.
Aligning around shared goals
Members of a small town in the Northeast deliberate local land use, motivated by shared goals that surmount political divisions.
Community problem solving
In a large Midwestern city dealing with gun violence, members of the community shared their personal experiences and ideas to identify root causes and potential actions to address the challenges.
Foundational Principles
Living Systems
Living systems are self-organizing life forms that interact with their environment. These systems are maintained by flows of information, energy and matter. Living systems are driven to push against the Second Law of Thermodynamics—they strive to create order, meaning, understanding—in order to survive in spite of entropic forces.
Collective Human Intelligence
Rather than have AI undermine trust in knowledge, we propose using AI to learn collective knowledge models--causal models that retain provenance, explainability, and context.
Amplifying collective human intelligence through technology. “I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among people of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.”
— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1671
Third Wave of Artificial Intelligence
First Wave AI: Handcrafting models of human intelligence.
Second Wave AI: Statistical learning from data.
Third Wave AI: Incorporates humanity and nature.
The guiding principle for AI must be supporting an ecosystem of life globally. Rejecting the concept of a 'transcendent' intelligence, it must be transparent, explainable, co-created with human guidance, and designed in accordance with natural laws.