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Imagine if you could bring 250 people together in a massive room and have them discuss and debate an important issue, arguing the points and counterpoints, and converging on answers that accurately reflect their collective knowledge, wisdom, values, and sensibilities.

Now imagine that you convened this debate on America’s 250 th birthday and asked 250 randomly selected Americans to come up with the top three innovations that America has contributed to the world over the last 250 years. What would they come up with?

I know – this all sounds impossible.

After all, you can’t get more than a dozen people to have a productive conversation on anything. At large scale, nobody would get enough airtime to express their views or respond to others. This is why typical business meetings or focus groups never have more than 8 to 10 people. Thoughtful real-time conversations just don’t scale.

To solve this, a new category of AI technology called “hyper-communication ” is greatly expanding the size, scope, and efficiency of large-scale deliberations. It uses specialized AI agents to connect groups in real-time, allowing people to discuss and debate issues at any scale . The goal is to enable hundreds or even thousands of participant to hold thoughtful discussions where they can express their views and argue the merits of any issue.

I first wrote about this emerging technology in VentureBeat two years ago in an article about “ Collective Superintelligence .” In that piece, I explain how large human groups can be hyper-connected by AI agents in ways that greatly amplify the group’s collective intelligence . You can check out the science behind hyper-communication in that prior VentureBeat piece. Here I am focusing on the debate among 250 Americans on America’s birthday.

To do this, I asked the team at Unanimous AI to field a randomly selected group of at least 250 Americans (with a broad distribution from every region in the country and diverse mix of political and social demographics) and invite them to a twenty-minute online debate inside a hyper-communication platform called Thinkscape that enables massively scalable discussion by text, voice, or video.

Once connected, we asked the group to come up with the top three contributions that America has made to the world over the last 250 years – not a survey of opinions, but deliberation of ideas, arguments, evidence, and reasoning. The group converged on a set of top answers that surprised me – but on reflection, they were sensible and well-reasoned.

Before getting into the answers, let me show you what the debate looks like behind the scenes. There were 277 people, each of them debating the issues with four or five other people in parallel discussion spaces. The magic is the swarm of AI agents that connect all the small groups together into a single real-time deliberation.This is what it looks like at high speed:

In the debate above, the group of 277 people came up with 94 different ideas and then narrowed it down to a top 10, then a top 3 . In the gif above, we just plot the top ten ideas as they emerged and battle for support during the live conversational debate.

The most interesting part of a large debate like this is not the answers, but the reasons that emerge to justify the answers. Here is the group’s reasoning behind the “top three innovations” that America has given to the world over the last 250 years:

#1: The Internet: “Our collective perspective is that America’s greatest contribution to the world over the past 250 years is the internet. It was born exclusively in the U.S. through academic and government research and was scaled globally with profound impact. It transformed communication, democratized information and education, enabled commerce, medicine, research and cultural exchange, and amplified soft power and civic organizing. We also acknowledged significant harms (misinformation, addiction, privacy loss) and arguments that it’s recent, global, or not uniquely American.”

#2 Advances in medicine : “Our collective perspective is that the United States has saved and prolonged hundreds of millions of lives worldwide. American-developed vaccines have successfully eradicated or controlled once-deadly diseases, significantly extending life expectancy and enabling broader societal and technological progress. From major breakthroughs in cancer research and treatments to cutting-edge medical technologies that have revolutionized hospital safety and procedures, U.S. ingenuity has redefined healthcare. Ultimately, while the global diffusion of affordable medicines and vaccines has extended these benefits across borders, the U.S. remains a premier medical destination where people from around the world travel to receive the most advanced treatments.”

#3: Spreading democracy: “Our collective perspective is that one of America’s most significant global contributions is the nation's system of governance. The US has long demonstrated democracy in practice as an enduring global model. The U.S. Constitution provided a vital blueprint for representative government, inspiring democratic movements and revolutions worldwide while actively promoting human rights and individual liberties internationally. By empowering citizens with the fundamental power to vote and choose their own leaders, this framework has served as a foundational framework for broader societal advances and directly helped establish thriving democracies around the world.”

It’s important to remember, this is 100% human intelligence — a pure reflection of the collective knowledge, wisdom, and values of 277 randomly selected Americans. That’s because the role of the AI agents in a hyper-communication system is to connect people, not replace them. The agents work to enable scalable human deliberation in which every participant is given optimized ability to express their views, respond to others, and converge on solutions based on their merits. The only question left is — what should we ask next?

Louis Rosenberg earned his PhD from Stanford University, was a professor at California State University (Cal Poly) and has been awarded over 300 patents for his work in human-computer interaction, AI, and collective intelligence.

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Zero Americans trust Gen Z to change a tire during roadside emergencies.

Gen X earns strongest trust, 67 percent believing Xers could swap a tire over.

Despite poor public perception many Gen Z drivers do successfully complete repairs.

If you’re stranded with a flat tire somewhere in America, don’t expect many people to hand the jack to a Gen Z driver to help. According to a new global survey, not a single US respondent said younger motorists would be their first choice for changing a tire.

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The research, commissioned by Autotrader UK and based on responses from more than 3,000 drivers across 15 countries, found that Americans overwhelmingly trust Gen X when roadside repairs are needed. Some 67 percent picked drivers aged roughly 46 to 61 as the generation they’d trust most to swap a tire, while Gen Z scored a remarkable zero percent.

Also: A $4,900 Per Month AI Robot Is Coming For The $17-An-Hour Guy Who Changes Your Tires

Photo Hankook

The US wasn’t alone, either. Drivers in the UK, Portugal, and Australia were equally unconvinced, with Gen Z also receiving no votes in those countries. Globally, the youngest generation managed just 2 percent support, while Gen X dominated, with 57 percent saying they’d trust them most to handle a tire change.

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Read: California Isn’t Banning Performance Tires, But It Might Decide What Aftermarket Tires You Can Buy

Interestingly, Gen Z doesn’t share that lack of confidence in its peers. In the UK, 43 percent of younger drivers believe they can change a tire (even though few cars now have them ) while 29 percent of American Gen Z respondents say they feel capable too. The problem, it seems, isn’t confidence. It’s convincing everyone else.

TikTok The Teacher

Photo Hyundai | Lead image Nissan

The study also suggests younger drivers are learning differently rather than avoiding car maintenance altogether. Across most countries, Gen Z is the generation most likely to seek repair advice through social media, YouTube, TikTok, and AI tools. The US is one of the few exceptions where Millennials actually lead social media use for automotive guidance, while Gen X tops AI usage, which is kind of scary.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Gen Z’s reputation may be much worse than reality. Among younger drivers who’ve actually attempted repairs, over 80 percent in most countries said they didn’t make the problem worse. Which I guess counts as a successful fix. The exception is South Africa, where almost half of Gen Z said they’d made a problem worse while attempting a repair.

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Most And Least Trusted Generations

Country Most Trusted

Generation % Trusting

Them Least Trusted

Generation % Trusting

Them

USA Gen X 67% Gen Z 0%

Portugal Gen X 64% Gen Z 0%

Netherlands Gen X 63% Gen Z 2%

Ireland Gen X 62% Silent Generation 0%

Spain Gen X 62% Silent Generation 0%

UK Gen X 61% Gen Z 0%

New Zealand Gen X 60% Silent Generation 0%

Greece Gen X 59% Silent Generation 0%

Australia Gen X 58% Gen Z 0%

Germany Gen X 56% Silent Generation 2%

Italy Gen X 56% Gen Z 1%

Canada Gen X 55% Gen Z 1%

France Gen X 53% Silent Generation 1%

Poland Gen X 50% Silent Generation 1%

South Africa Millennials 46% Silent Generation 1%

SWIPE

Gen Z: 1997-2012

Millennials: 1981-96

Gen X: 1965-80

Baby boomers: 1946-64

S ilent Generation: 1928-45

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