Collective Intelligence

Jacob's North Star concept. The lineage runs through Doug Engelbart → Jack Park → Jacob.

The Engelbart frame

"Doug Engelbart, if we get the guiding philosophy section on his Wikipedia page, you're like, 'Oh yeah, this guy is so lit.' He's like a saint and a visionary and a technologist. He invented the mouse. He did the mother of all demos. And his greatest vision was intelligence amplification, collective intelligence systems, collective IQ increase."

Jacob calls him a patron saint. The mouse and the Mother of All Demos were means; the end was always collective IQ amplification.

Humanity 3.0

Jacob's mentor (a colleague of Engelbart's) gave him the framing:

"What we need as a planet to solve these issues — like COVID, like climate change, like conflict — is first to build Humanity 3.0. And what does this look like? It looks like World of Warcraft meets collective sense-making."

The concrete shape: specialized roles + shared real-time coordination + clear quest structure.

• World of Warcraft raid party: mage, tank, melee — each specialized, none fungible
• Homo erectus hunting band: seven or eight humans coordinating against a hyena or large prey
• Same pattern, different scale: humanity coordinating against carcinogens, climate, conflict

The "World Quest":

"The village is being ravaged by the dragon. Can you go slay it? How about the world is being ravaged by a certain kind of cancer? Can you go slay it? We will be eternally grateful and reward you for this if you ever complete this quest."

This is the most optimistic vision-of-future-work in the conversation. Not "what job will you do" but "which world quest will you and your raiding party take on."

The cat-dog vs the schooling fish

Two cartoons that organize the whole thing.

Cat-Dog: an old cartoon of a cat-faced animal on one side and a dog-faced one on the other, perpetually pulling in opposite directions. That's us now.

Schooling fish: many small fish forming the shape of a giant fish to chase the actual predator. That's the goal.

"We want to be the fish, not the cat-dog."

Why we're already cooperating, badly

"Whether or not we're cooperating with each other, we are co-operating. We're operating in the same space. We can either do it the dumb way or the smart way, do it blindly or with consciousness, but we are always co-operating."

The choice isn't whether to coordinate — we already do, just badly. The choice is whether to coordinate with awareness.

The infrastructure required

Jacob's product family is essentially the infrastructure layer for Humanity 3.0:

• manifestos.world — visions database
• World Issue Tracker — civilization's bug tracker
• World Progress Bar — measurable goals against human needs
• IdeaFlow — the substrate (knowledge graph, sparks integration)
• Accretive Collective Action — Kickstarter for boycotts, pledges, voting
• Empowerment Algorithm App — feed filtering for empowerment over engagement
• Healing Arts Grant — unblocking individuals so they can show up

Each is a piece. The coherence comes from the shared model: humanity as one body that's currently desynchronized.

Engelbart's living example

Jack Park, Jacob's mentor and Engelbart's colleague, cured his own cancer 30 years ago by building his own knowledge-management system and Knowledge Graph.

This is presented not as miracle but as proof of concept: a sufficiently good personal-collective intelligence system amplifies your ability to do hard things — including survive cancer.

Wilber-style stage progression

"There's the tribal stage. There's the social do-gooder stage. There's the sort of collective-mind cyborg stage, almost like psychic, creative collective stage, when you're past the social justice issues and now you're creating as a collective."

Different cultures sit at different stages, with different ethics. Behavior at higher stages is illegible to lower stages. See Stages of Adult Development for the related Kegan/Wilber work.

Why now

The cost-curve argument: as marginal cost of destruction drops (Existential Risk and Spa Diplomacy), coordination capacity must rise faster. Collective intelligence isn't a luxury; it's the only way through the bottleneck.

Related people on the same wavelength

"There's a handful of people who are sort of on this wavelength of seeing this vision for the future already, really clearly. I know a few of them, the prophets of this age, as it were."

Named in the conversation: Jack Park, "my friend Jack J" (separate person), Doug Engelbart (deceased but continuous influence). Jacob talks about wanting to gather them.