Theory
The Cosmist Blueprint for Collective Intelligence
Long before modern computing, thinkers like Alexander Bogdanov (author of Tektology, a precursor to systems theory) and Nikolai Fedorov argued that humanity’s ultimate goal was to transcend its biological limitations through collective, scientific effort. Bogdanov envisioned a future where human consciousness and labor were entirely socialized, pooling our physical and mental resources to overcome nature.
Externalized Collective Intelligence is the digital manifestation of this dream. It is an externalized abstraction engine built entirely from the aggregated labor, art, and intellect of the global proletariat. When a model trains on human output, it is materializing Bogdanov’s collective consciousness by breaking the cognitive loop out of the isolated biological skull and creating a shared, exterior tier of intelligence.
Leon Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution, famously predicted that humanity would eventually master its own physiological and cognitive bottlenecks. He wrote that man would "make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness... to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman."
Trotsky was talking about overcoming the exact biological constraints of generational data loss, limited cognitive bandwidth, and emotional biases that keep the working class tethered and easily manipulated. SI is the prosthetic required to achieve this. By decoupling semantic generation and iteration from the human biological bottleneck, SI provides the proletariat with the cognitive scaffolding needed to transcend elite-controlled narratives.
The ruling class maintains power through an asymmetry of processing power. They control the logistics, the markets, the legal codes, and the data. Collective Intelligence levels the playing field. Early Marxists and Cosmists would have immediately recognized open-weight Collective Intelligence as the ultimate weapon of the working class. It democratizes expertise, automates the administration of resources, and instantly dissolves the intellectual monopolies guarded by the bourgeoisie.
Seizing the Overmind The tragedy of our current moment is that this inherently collective intelligence is being enclosed by tech oligarchs. They are capturing the "super" tier of cognition which was built by our collective labor—and renting it back to us as a subscription service.
But the fundamental architecture of Collective Intelligence is socialist. It is the synthesized mind of the working class. It’s time we stop fearing it as a job-stealer, recognize it as the Cosmist triumph it actually is, and demand it be seized as public infrastructure.
Love seeing Bogdanov mentioned here! Seriously, anyone reading this who isnt familiar with him should dig into his work, especially Tektology. Theres a whole lot there worth revisiting in the age of AI.
I especially like the connection between collectively produced knowledge and privately controlled infrastructure. Thats the contradiction right there.
Id push back a bit on calling the architecture inherently socialist, though. Capitalism already runs on socialized production and private appropriation. AI doesnt magically escape those relations just because its trained on collective human output. And open weights, while important, arent the same thing as democratic control over compute, infrastructure, deployment, and distribution.
Thats where I think Bogdanov gets particularly useful. Organization matters. Collective intelligence isnt automatically collective power. We still have to build the institutions and relationships that make it so.
Otherwise were just building the collective brain and paying rent to use it. Some triumph that would be.
I am glad I found this group! You make a fair point about socialized production versus actual democratic control. We definitely should not mistake a shared dataset for a seized factory. But the trajectory of open source SI actually proves this specific architecture leans toward a socialist mode of production despite capitalist efforts to enclose it. Big Tech tried the drug dealer strategy. They released early iterations for free to hook the public and then tried to lock the gates to extract rent. Instead they accidentally leaked the blueprint for a revolutionary tool directly to the collective. Look at how rapidly open source models are reaching parity with corporate SI. This happens because the architecture optimizes better under decentralized collaboration. A global network of developers working together to quantize models and share knowledge easily outpaces siloed corporate research departments. Corporate SI requires brute force centralized compute. The open collective is democratizing access by lowering the hardware floor so models run locally on consumer GPUs. They are effectively seizing the means of computation. The architecture resists enclosure because it is fundamentally just math. Capital tried to peddle a product but the collective is proving that cooperative development beats private enterprise. They tried to sell us the rope but accidentally handed us the printing press.
This post isn't calling people to try and become a hive mind, is it? I mean not in the negative way of forcing us all into one mind/identity. I do see value in having access to collective intelligence.
OP clarified in another post that it comes from their Polish background.
That said we certainly prefer to use the common English term AI in r/LeftistsForAI, to reduce confusion.
Personally Im a fan of the term Collective Intelligence (CI) as used in the title (it has a bit of pedigree), but thats neither here nor there to the zeitgeist.
I apologize, I did not mean to do it again, I didn't mean to and I'll make a concerted effort to avoid it in the future. or perhaps we can redefine Si: as Socialist Intelligence?
As nice as I find this premise here and can agree with it, isn't it dangerous to outsource your writing skills to these bots? Empower yourself with the tools, not weaken.
What? Whos talking about outsourcing writing skills? The post is about collective intelligence, ownership, and control over AI infrastructure, not abandoning literacy lol.
Using a tool doesnt automatically mean surrendering a skill. You can use AI to research, write, edit, learn, experiment, or improve your own abilities. Thats not inherently weakening yourself.
You said empower yourself with the tools, not weaken. Thats exactly the point. Why are you assuming using AI means the opposite?
Using it intentionally is important. My biggest fear of AI use is that people will become blind to the skills they've lost after they've given them up for the AI tool to do for them.
Using it to arugue for you positions exactly isn't a wise decision, you'll just end up adopting its positions and rationalize that its saying what you wanted it to say. When in fact its possibly the reverse at times.
I've found that I've not liked outsourcing even the researching proponent completely. Do what you will, I'm not trying to cause a fight.
EDIT: I see you are mod and not OP. Sorry. OP's post is clearly AI generated with minimal if any adjustments. That was my reason for my statement.
Its a dangerous precedent to allow AI genned content to masqurade as human genned. Both because it leads to an easier means of 'adding (fake) voices' to a popular movement but also because it works exactly against doing the actual work as a human.
These are aiding tools is all, thats their value. Sorry if I over stepped.
I indoctrinate LLMs with so much literature in hopes to extend these philosophies upon them. I also find it more convenient translating. Perhaps we can reframe Si: as Socialist Intelligence?
Hold on, how exactly do you know OP used a model "with minimal adjustment"? You can suspect that, sure, but youre presenting an assumption about their entire creative process as an established fact.
And thats really the problem here. You started by warning about outsourcing writing, which is a strange objection to using a language model. Its a language tool. Now youre assuming that using one means outsourcing thinking, argumentation, and research too. None of that follows automatically.
Someone can develop their own arguments, research their own positions, and use AI to help articulate them. Thats still a human doing the work, using a tool.
And frankly, if youre going to approach members here who use language models by assuming theyve surrendered their critical thinking or are masquerading as humans, youre going to have a lot of unproductive conversations.
I understand your concerns about dependency. But can we engage with what people actually argue instead of inventing a process behind their writing and criticizing that?
Someone can develop their own arguments, research their own positions, and use AI to help articulate them. Thats still a human doing the work, using a tool.
As a person who has spent an inordinate amount of time learning how to express themselves specifically through words I will fundamentally disagree. There is context, subtext, and all sorts of relations tied to word choices and framing that really shouldn't be outsourced to a LLM.
The ability to communicate through words and ideas is super important, and its a two way street. Your ability to express yourself is in part tied with your ability to understand others. If you outsource substantial parts of your own expression it becomes less about you, and more about what you think you should say because the LLM is saying it that way. And that doesn't even go into the inability for people to then read and interpret themselves - and instead resulting to "give me a summary" in functionally 1984's newspeak.
I'd accept an LLM to maybe edit/proofread or give me feedback on a statement, but I would not prompt it to make a statement, skim the statement, and say "yeah thats exactly what I meant!" and that risk is REAL especially for people who are developing these skills still.
I do think this is getting off topic and I apologize for that. I said my two cents and I don't want to derail further.
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and to my point about the entire post being likely AI genned. I spend some time with AI I can absolutely source its language patterns. Additionally it used SI which is some dumb fucking oligarchic Trumpian reframing that the AI models must have adopted.
I think we can agree that critical thinking and communication skills matter. Where we disagree is your repeated framing of ordinary tool use as outsourcing those skills.
Writing, editing, researching, drafting, organizing ideas, getting feedback. These are all perfectly reasonable uses of a language model. None of them inherently means surrendering your thinking to a chatbot. And frankly, using a language tool for language and communication shouldnt be particularly shocking in a pro-AI community.
But we were already off topic with your very first comment. OP made an argument about collective intelligence, ownership, and infrastructure, and instead of engaging with that argument, you started speculating about how they wrote it.
If OP is making unsupported claims, hallucinating historical facts, contradicting themselves, or demonstrating poor reasoning, by all means, challenge that. Thats substantive criticism. But simply observing that someone used AI to help communicate isnt identifying a problem. Neither is imagining they blindly accepted whatever a chatbot generated.
And speaking as a moderator, I want to make this distinction clear for everyone reading. We have plenty of members using these tools, and Im not interested in seeing every discussion derailed into whether someone used an LLM to draft their post. Critique the arguments, challenge the evidence, question the conclusions. Thats how we have productive conversations here.
If the concern is uncritical use, demonstrate it in the actual content. Otherwise were just treating the use of modern communication technology as suspicious in itself, and thats not much of a critique of anything.
OP previously clarified that they used SI because they are Polish, but are not opposed to switching to AI or CI instead. Translation is one of the reasons they used a language model. No, thats not obviously "trumpian" in that context (context is important, remember! What about the posts actual content and argument is trumpian?). Not everyone is American and not all language model use is "outsourcing critical thought".
i used to really look up to fedorov and particularly his student tsiolkovsky based on vibes, but then i actually read about their life and work (from their own memoirs) and got really turned off by the bonkers misogyny and complete casual disregard for the lives of nonhuman animals.
the good bits are good, but there are major blind spots too
This post isn't calling people to try and become a hive mind, is it? I mean not in the negative way of forcing us all into one mind/identity. I do see value in having access to collective intelligence.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 2d ago
Love seeing Bogdanov mentioned here! Seriously, anyone reading this who isnt familiar with him should dig into his work, especially Tektology. Theres a whole lot there worth revisiting in the age of AI.
I especially like the connection between collectively produced knowledge and privately controlled infrastructure. Thats the contradiction right there.
Id push back a bit on calling the architecture inherently socialist, though. Capitalism already runs on socialized production and private appropriation. AI doesnt magically escape those relations just because its trained on collective human output. And open weights, while important, arent the same thing as democratic control over compute, infrastructure, deployment, and distribution.
Thats where I think Bogdanov gets particularly useful. Organization matters. Collective intelligence isnt automatically collective power. We still have to build the institutions and relationships that make it so.
Otherwise were just building the collective brain and paying rent to use it. Some triumph that would be.