Collective Intelligence Ahoy: A modest proposal

Greetings (m)otherboard members and friends,

Earlier this year, a search for the future Executive Director of Humanity AI was announced. 

In case you haven’t been following along, Humanity AI is a $500M philanthropic collaborative that, in its own words, “is dedicated to ensuring civil society has the power and resources to shape AI's future...uniting philanthropy in a broad coalition to build a more human(e) future in which AI is shaped by and for people.” 

No small task! Humanity AI is probably the most significant philanthropic opportunity and commitment we’ll have in the immediate term to address what we all see at our doorsteps. 

When you consider today’s news of Anthropic’s $30B funding round, $380B valuation, and upcoming negotiations with the Pentagon, you have a better understanding of the orders of magnitude and odds we’re working with here, and why this role and collaborative holds such a promising role for our future, to put it mildly. 

(It’s honestly such a big deal, flabbergasting and absurd that we’re at this point we’re having a hard time keeping a straight face writing any of this. So glad you are here and we’re all in solidarity at this particular moment in time). 

The God(m)others took keen notice of this role because it’s what we’ve been working on day in and day out for most of our careers. And also because we’ve already worked with more than half of the funders in the collective in some capacity. 

We got to thinking: what if we apply for this role as a collective? We already have what they are looking for: 100+ years experience, governance, open and distributed membership, an Infrastructure Fund and GBI program, and a portfolio of public engagement projects. 

Which is exactly what we’ve done! And we’re sharing our application with all of you! As you’ll see, we’re proposing a “pirate ship fleet of many vessels,” or a David strategy to face off this particular Goliath. 

Below please find the copy of our Cover Letter. Does this approach of distributed decision making, governance, and resourcing resonate with you? Join us as a member and let’s talk all about it at tomorrow’s timely and relevant book club where we’ll read The Changemakers Guide: Proven Methods for Building Impactful Social Tech by Dr. Kortney Ziegler. 

Read all about it below, and please continue the conversation over at this post on LinkedIn. 

– The God(m)others

Dear Humanity AI Steering Committee,

Straight out the gate, we have to give you snaps for attempting something genuinely difficult: stepping in to “steer” the ship of civilization-shaping technology towards human flourishing during times when it’s being actively deployed as a tool of surveillance and war.

As the old maritime saying goes, “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor!” Understatement of the century, and certainly of this job!

Which brings us to a humble, sincere and possibly “just mad enough to work” proposal.

No one person can or should carry the future of AI and its relationship to humanity alone. So what if the Executive Director of Humanity AI were not one person but rather a collective?

More specifically, what if it were us: the God(m)others of (m)otherboard?

Look, we’re going to tell it to you straight: we’re not convinced that when it comes to the future of humanity and artificial intelligence, the leadership we’re going to need involves either the verb “executing” or “directing.”

Your ambitious project describes the governance of complex systems, cultural legitimacy, public trust, cross-sector coordination and nevermind the emotional labor of holding long term ethical and moral questions.

The status quo is a setup for failure. We’ve all seen how this movie ends: burnout, bottlenecks, and polite resignation letters 18 months later with a garbage fire of competition, cannibalization and miscommunication in its wake.

What if Humanity AI isn’t building a navy but funding a fleet? Less polished flagship, more pirate ships: agile, crewed, values-driven, and fun?

(m)otherboard is a tech justice collective with over 100 combined years doing the work Humanity AI exists to support, and over four years of experience doing this work together: we’ve convened artists, technologists, faith leaders, ethicists, policymakers and intergenerational communities to wrestle with technology’s social consequences, and build new, liberatory technology for the future.

So why us? Well, here’s some of our qualifications:

• Served in the Obama White House tech policy team
• Raised $100M+ for diverse storytellers
• Built movements like Zebras Unite (adopted as part of Japan’s national economic strategy) and companies like Seed&Spark and Colorstock
• Created the Contributor Covenant, the most widely adopted code of conduct in tech
• Served as analysts for Fortune 500 tech leaders
• Held fellowships at Harvard & Columbia
• Addressed audiences as diverse as United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights, SXSW, Sundance, and Los Alamos National Lab
• Advised most major tech companies on ethical practices
• Guided nonprofits, funds, and global institutions through big transitions
• Wrote We Just Build Hammers: Stories from the Past, Present, and Future of Responsible Tech, a book about the history of ethics in technology
• And, to keep up the pirate metaphor, one of us has sailed nearly ten thousand miles in an actual sailboat and knows how to handle the weather

Most obviously: You already know us! We’ve been funded by or worked alongside partners at the Kapor Foundation, Ford Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Omidyar Network, MacArthur Foundation, and Siegel Family Endowment.

Here’s why we think we’re the best (m)others for the job. We have experience:

• From YouTube videos with 80 million streams to Fortune 500 boardrooms, we translate complex technical questions into cultural language people actually engage with.
• Holding effective, participatory processes that arrive at concrete, straightforward codes of conduct, roles, rights, responsibilities and privileges: the core components of collective, distributed intelligence
• Designing governance and funding experiments that distribute authority and resources rather than hoard them
• And crucially: doing this work together, as a coordinated organism and network

Curious about our service to humanity? Buckle up! Between the six of us we are actively caregiving for 7 children, 12 elderly parents, 81 acres of land, and 1 bakery. And with our diverse locations (Atlanta, North and South Carolina, Detroit, Chicago, Midcoast Maine) we are geographically connected to communities outside of the traditional tech hubs.

In short: we already operate drawing on the best principles of AI that humanity can learn from: we are distributed, relational, redundant by design and resilient to a single point of failure.

In partnership with you and our existing membership, our collective, coherent executive function will come up with:

• A leadership pod with clear accountability
• Defined domains to hit the ground running (strategy, field-building, narrative, and operations are all specialities of ours)
• A clear public interface connected to a network of many internal brains
• An existing, ratified, replicable, tried and tested governance and fund structure that models the future Humanity AI is hoping to midwife.
• A clear and embodied manifesto

If you’re looking to fund experiments in how humanity adapts to AI, our collective leadership would model that world, straight out of the gate.

We call on the words of George Bernard Shaw who said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Given these unreasonable times and Humanity AI’s unreasonable mandate, we’re asking you to choose the unreasonable path: rather than choose “one man,”  how about a collective of (m)others instead?

We’d love to talk. And if nothing else, consider this letter a live prototype of the kind of imagination Humanity AI could stand for in the world. One in which people experienced with birthing, caring for and raising humans may have a say in the future of technology in service to all life.

With appreciation, curiosity, humility and a deep respect for choosing, in the face of domination and hegemony, simplicity, elegance and collective intelligence,

Arrrrr,

– The God(m)others