About the New Paradigm Coalition
Contemporary global challenges—climate change, inequality, mental health crises, social polarization—exist as complex adaptive systems that emerge from intricate interactions across economic, cultural, psychological, and political dimensions. These challenges exceed the analytical capacity of traditional disciplinary approaches and require interdisciplinary frameworks that can simultaneously process multiple scales and domains of human experience. In this talk we conceptualize prosocial intelligence as a way to deal with these complex challenges by enabling the self-organization of collectives at the different levels at which these challenges manifest, implying a novel form of "emergence-driven problem solving".
Prosocial intelligence can be understood as a sub-discipline of decision-making that draws some inspiration from other areas such as market and military intelligence, but with fundamentally different organizational principles and information flow patterns. In market, military, and other intelligences it is typically assumed that each actor has a predetermined role and receives information filtered for their specific function, and decision-making flows from top to bottom through the role-hierarchy. Prosocial intelligence, by contrast, must support fluid, multi-role networks where hierarchies form locally and temporarily around specific challenges, where individuals can simultaneously be leaders in one domain and followers in another, and where information needs to be accessible across multiple organizational levels without strict gatekeeping.
While related approaches like distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs), liquid democracy, and platform cooperatives have explored decentralized governance and fluid participation, they face limitations in power concentration, overdelegation, and narrow domain focus. We will discuss that the prosocial intelligence approach could extend beyond these by leveraging AI's capacity for pattern recognition and multidimensional complexity processing. Namely, current AI systems present an unexpected opportunity for addressing the structural challenges required for emergence-driven problem solving for interdisciplinary complex adaptive challenges. AI models can encode and process the multidimensional complexity of fluid, multi-role networks in ways that exceed human cognitive capacity, while providing personalized, contextually-relevant insights to each participant regardless of their current role or position in the emerging collective. We will end the talk discussing some ethical and futuristic issues regarding this novel form of socio-technological organization.
About the Speaker:
Tomas Veloz has a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies and an MSc in computer sciences, with majors in mathematics and physics. His research focuses on interdisciplinary mathematical modeling. His main research areas are Chemical Organization theory, where he has proven mathematical results such as the decomposition theorem and the existence of quantum-like organizational structures, and quantum cognition, where he has developed methods to represent collections of concepts in a Hilbert Space, and has shown that various cognitive and language phenomena exhibit quantum structures.
Additionally, Tomas Veloz is the founder and director of the Foundation for Interdisciplinary Development of Science, Technology and Arts (www.dicta.cl), a Chilean foundation which collaborates with CLEA and several other institutions worldwide to generate and disseminate integrated knowledge, and to develop projects with social impact.