Funding the Commons San Francisco 2025

Collective Intelligence vs Superintelligence? Institutional design for resilience in the AI age
2025-03-16 , Main Stage

As AI-driven firms scale, they may operate under increasing returns to scale, making larger entities perpetually more efficient than smaller ones. This could lead to a global economy where a single AI-driven entity dominates, eroding competition and creating a natural monopoly. This talk explores the technological and economic forces driving this shift, the risks of market concentration, and potential responses.

Dr. Seth Frey is a computational social scientist who studies commons governance institutions and other complex social systems. He specializes in using online communities as model systems for emergent institutional and organizational phenomena. His expertise is in computational approaches to self-governance and the cognitive science of strategic behavior.

He is an associate professor in Communication at the University of California Davis, an affiliate of the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, and a Research Director at Metagov. He was a behavioral economist at Disney Research in Walt Disney Imagineering, and a complex systems scholar at NECSI. Seth earned his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Informatics (complex systems) at Indiana University in 2013, and a B.A. in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley.

Seth’s research has appeared in PNAS, Nature Scientific Reports, and Proceedings of the Royal Society. It has been covered in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and TEDx. It has been funded by the NSF, NASA, and the Ford Foundation.

Philosopher and entrepreneur with a background in law and behavioural science.

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