@tero

Agree that human nature, common sense, and popular culture tend to perpetuate lack of interest in seeing the bigger picture — or even recognizing that there might be one.

We fail to see that "more is different", and that what worked for our ancestors in small tribes no longer works at the scale of our global community. And especially in the US perhaps, individualism as identity leads to blind denial of collective approaches to problems/opportunities that exceed the grasp of individuals or small groups.

Issues that cross geopolitical borders, or involve multiple domains of knowledge—exceeding the context of meaning-making or scope of application of present-day agents—are opportunities for bigger-picture cognition augmented by machine intelligence.

Examples include creating and maintaining our evolving models of values—multi-layered, complex, and fine-grained—and our models of instrumental methods (science & technologies) for the promotion of those values into the future we discover by creating it.

But before we let ourselves depend too much on tools for thought that we don't adequately understand, we need to improve our philosophies of trust, reputation, values/preferences, decision-making, … ah, never mind. I got carried away considering the possibilities.

I suppose humans don't really care about bigger-picture thinking when there are more tangible opportunities right in front of us: using machine intelligence to more easily compete against our neighbors in business, defeat our enemies in war, and to increasingly amuse ourselves with decreasing effort…

#HumanNature #CulturalEvolution #SystemsThinking #Cooperation #individualism #collectivism #CollectiveCognition #SocialDecisionMaking