Greater collective intelligence and financial influence do not establish societal benefit; evaluating an investment institution requires explicit outcomes and harm constraints for affected nonowners as well as financial results.

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may fail to take proper precautions against existential risks—and as a result pursue a short explosive growth spurt that ends ingloriously in total collapse. Such an organization could have a very high degree of collective intelligence; if sufficiently high, the organization is a collective superintelligence. We should resist the temptation to roll every normatively desirable attribute into one giant amorphous concept of mental functioning, as though one could never find one admirable trait without all the others being equally present. Instead, we should recognize that there can exist instrumentally powerful information processing systems—intelligent systems—that are neither inherently good nor reliably wise. But we will revisit this issue in [Chapter](#page-128-0) 7.

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But certainly, given the fact that even the question of whether venture capitalists make private returns which compensate them for the risk that they take on is controversial (Kaplan and Schoar, 2005), it is premature to conclude what the social returns are. # **5.6 Government funding for startup firms**