Abstract

A recently developed model of general collective intelligence defines a method for organizing humans or artificially intelligent agents that is believed to create the potential to exponentially increase the general problem-solving ability of groups of such entities over that of any individual entity. An analysis based on this model suggests that many and perhaps all “wicked problems” are collective optimization problems that cannot reliably be addressed without a system of collective optimization, but that might be reliably addressed through such a system. This paper briefly introduces the concept of GCI as well as why it is a system of collective optimization, and explores why “wicked problems” from the perspective of GCI are collective optimization problems, and therefore why such problems might require GCI to be reliably solvable.