Below, Alex Pentland shares five key insights from his new book, Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI.
Alex is a data scientist and faculty member at both Stanford and MIT, known for co-founding the field of Computational Social Science. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, an advisor to Abu Dhabi Investment Authority Lab, and an advisor to the UN Secretary General’s office.
What’s the big idea?
Human progress has always come from communities learning, adapting, and sharing wisdom with one another. We can use those same forces today to overcome polarization, meet challenges, and create a more prosperous society.
1. Making progress.
Individuals’ search for better ways of living produces improvements for everyone. Examples include how the presence of a single role model of success in a neighborhood helps all the children in the neighborhood grow up healthier, or how a neighborhood’s connections to the surrounding city are often the main determinants of economic growth.
2. Growing wisdom.
The patterns of story sharing within a community coalesce into a community-wide worldview and determine that community’s ability to take successful collective action. How to successfully deal with crime or rebuild after a disaster are two examples.
3. Consensus from conflict.
Today, polarization and hate poison our ability to talk to others. In large experiments across the U.S., we have shown that there are surprisingly simple ways to reverse this process. The key is to minimize the voices of influencers, politicians, and other power-seekers so you can hear the voices of everyone else.
4. Creating prosperity.
We can build a prosperous society by evolving our culture and using our technologies to promote the growth and sharing of wisdom. In cities, for instance, that means giving government control back to communities while also designing public facilities to encourage mixing between communities with different worldviews.
5. Thriving in the face of adversity.
Since the Ice Age, humans have survived a sea level rise of 400 feet, eight degrees Fahrenheit of global warming, and pandemics that killed half of everyone. We did this by communities sharing their wisdom, that is, by having many autonomous communities, each with very different cultures, and by each community being willing to copy the successes of others.
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