Paper by Scott E Page: “Recent breakthroughs in Al combined with steady advances in information technology change the physics of organizational and institutional design. Discussions and deliberations can now include people in disparate locations speaking simultaneously. This opens up new possible designs for interactions that will enhance our ability to produce collective intelligence.
How do we make collective intelligence happen? Who should be in the room, and how do we design and structure their interactions? Design-minded social scientists approach these questions by embedding them within a variety of formal frameworks. Economists design markets and matching processes to produce efficient, fair allocations with aligned incentives. Political scientists create voting rules to select winners with broad support. Organizational scientists design communication and authority structures capable of generating innovative solutions and thoughtful strategic decisions.
These design-minded social scientists operate within sets of constraints. Some are cognitive. People can only store, attend to, and process so much information. Some are physical. Rooms can only be so large. Some are temporal. Everyone must be available Tuesday at 4pm. These constraints limit possible designs, and that reduces the efficiency, fairness, representativeness, and innovativeness of the outcomes that we might achieve.
Those constraints have now changed. Recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) combined with steady advancements in information technologies have altered the physics of organizational and institutional design (Farrell et al., 2025). In doing so, they have expanded the set of possible designs. The logic is straightforward: Removing constraints allows us to achieve more…(More)”.
