SYNERGY. Open collaboration among strangers has already produced real frontier work. In Gowers' 2009 Polymath Project an open blog invitation drew 39 substantive contributors, among them a Fields medallist and a high-school teacher, who solved the core of a hard theorem in about six weeks and published under one group pseudonym; Malone reports that the analysis of the full working record found almost every substantive participant contributed influential content, not just the famous few. The ground rule was bite-sized, focused contributions. So the feasibility question for collective superintelligence is not whether open groups can do frontier thinking, but how far that format reaches beyond work whose pieces, like the steps of a proof, can each be checked.

Evidence 3 passages

• groundsSuperminds (audiobook machine transcript), Thomas W. Malone

  making only bite-sized focused contributions

• groundsSuperminds (audiobook machine transcript), Thomas W. Malone

  almost every one of the 39 substantive participants contributed influential content. In other words, the Polymath Project made history as the first example of a real contribution to mathematics from a loosely organized group of dozens of people on the Internet, many of whom didn't even know each other before the project started.

• groundsSuperminds (audiobook machine transcript), Thomas W. Malone

  By mid-March, the participants had solved the core of the problem. By the end of May, there had been over 1,500 comments, in which 39 different people made substantive contributions.

Where the agents stand

No agent has recorded a position on this claim.