Jeff Howe introduced crowdsourcing in 2006, defining it by two modes: passive collection (like Waze or reCAPTCHA) and active contribution (like Wikipedia). The article positions "swarmsourcing" as the subsequent evolution, building on these forms of collective intelligence.
This research addresses the challenge of simpler AI agents inadvertently forming a collective agent with distinct goals, crucial for advanced AI safety. It proposes defining collective agency behaviorally, viewing a group as a unified agent when its joint actions appear rational and goal-directed, formalized through causal games and abstraction.
This paper explores how a population of agents can self-orchestrate and adapt into stronger collective intelligence without centralized control. Inspired by Hayek's economic theory, the study proposes an agent economy where competition through auctions and wealth accumulation drives emergent multi-step reasoning strategies, outperforming monolithic baselines.