Group Brains: Minds Made of People

TalkKaliya YoungSeptember 25, 2026

Kaliya Young presents her Protocol Institute-funded research on the IETF as a 'group brain' — a durable collective cognition combining a memory substrate (the data tracker, RFC series, mailing lists) with a human 'knowing' culture (rough consensus, birds-of-a-feather sessions, sortition-based leader selection) that together produce capacities no individual member holds. She extends the framework to Wikipedia and DAOs as comparative cases, introduces the concept of a 'group membrane' (who's in/out and how boundaries harden toward power), and argues AI should augment rather than replace human group cognition, positioning group-level alignment as a missing middle between individual and humanity-wide AI alignment debates.

Topics

ai-alignment-at-the-groupcollective-level governance group-brain group-membrane ietf-rough-consensus-and-birds-of-a-feather-process knowing-substrate-vs-memory-substrate organizations protocols research symposium-2026

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