Transforming Economies and Generating Sustainable “Green” Economic Growth After the COVID-19 Pandemic through General Collective Intelligence

The lockdown of economic activity in many countries as a measure to stop the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to high levels of unemployment and other indicators of a potentially upcoming economic crisis. As a gauge of the seriousness of these concerns some have suggested that current levels of some of these indicators have not been seen in the US since the time of the great depression. This paper explores how General Collective Intelligence, a recent innovation in group decision-making systems, might reliably generate the economic growth needed to avert such a crisis where not reliably achievable otherwise. Current group decision-making systems, whether choosing a human decision-maker, consensus voting on decisions, or automated decision-systems such as conventional collective intelligence, have been suggested to lack the capacity to maximize more than a very few group outcomes simultaneously due to specific limitations. Since impact on collective well-being is determined by impact on an open (unbounded) set of outcomes, this implies lack of the capacity to maximize the necessary range of impacts on well-being for groups if that range is too broad. If so, the breadth of impact required to achieve sustainable “green” economic development while simultaneously solving hunger, solving the environmental degradation that consensus has linked to climate change, as well as providing maximal access to healthcare, education, and other resources, may not be reliably possible with current decision systems. General Collective Intelligence or GCI replicates the adaptive problem solving mechanisms by which nature has demonstrated the ability to optimally respond to an unlimited set of problems, and by which nature has demonstrated the ability to potentially increase sustainability per unit of resources by orders of magnitude so that life is reliably self-sustaining. This paper explores why GCI can potentially be used to reliably drive self-sustaining economic growth to revive economies in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, and why GCI has the potential to reliably drive a transformation to sustainable green economies while doing so.