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Abstract

This last lecture is a synergistic review of my 40 years of research on collective and artificial intelligence and their influence on information technology-enabled problem solving and creativity. Beginning with early notions of artificial intelligence, their optimistic beliefs, and profound limitations, the talk identifies the persistent data and reasoning problems that once constrained research insight and practice. We then explore how improvements in data availability, connectedness, and processing power enabled both advanced machine reasoning and the effective coordination of human collectives through wikis, crowds, and the motivation that enabled crowds to perform.

The journey reveals how IT-based reasoning began to surpass individuals and collectives whose insights they represented, setting the stage for a deeper analysis of generative artificial intelligence. We will note that large language and multimodal models begin to “go their own way,” discovering latent categories and patterns—such as photon-level visual features—that no human has ever explicitly perceived or named. This marks a shift from AI as replicator to AI as generator of its own body of knowledge, alien to us.

As we examine both the abilities and the limits of generative AI in difficult cognitive tasks, we reach the final frontier: human creativity and its symbiosis with machines. The question whether machines can be creative, lets us challenge our understanding of creativity and our own abilities to be creative.

The lecture concludes with a Quo Vadis reflection on the future human role—emphasizing the enduring importance of empiricism, purposeful intent as a driver of engagement, and the deeper dimensions of the human condition in an age of increasingly autonomous intelligence.

About the Speaker

Christian Wagner