init-common intelligence =>
Version 0.42*
On Common Intelligence, or Gemeine Intelligenz
The paragraphs that follow here build components for a theory of common intelligence or GEMEINE INTELLIGENZ. You can link them by adding /#§N to the URL (i.e init-c.de/common-intelligence/#§9), while N is the paragraph number.
(§1)
Conventional, mainstream AI of the mid-2020s has reached its end phase, which is not a state, but rather a tendency or a machine comparable to a black hole sucking everything (material ressources, energy, symbolic worlds, cultures and dreams) into itself.
(§2)
To find lines of flight without center, evading these black holes materialized as AI data centers, we need to figure out something different. I propose to call this otherwise possibility (a virtuality in Deleuzian terms) COMMON INTELLIGENCE or GEMEINE INTELLIGENZ. Hopefully it can turn such black holes of stupidity into radiating stars of intelligence.
(§3)
The semantic content of the English word "common" generates interferences of at least two overlapping fields of meanings like a moire pattern. Common means widespread, usual, shared and mutual, but also ordinary, insignificant, mediocre, faceless — especially in context of a bourgeois, elitist, ableism-driven society seeking excellence, nobility and power by "hard" work.
(§4)
For the wealthy and noble the common is below their level. GEMEIN, the German analogue of common, amplifies this top-down, high-to-low perspective towards meanings such as nasty, mean or cruel. The mean, ordinary and mediocre comrade is insignificant, thus common for those in power, but the rich and powerful have at the same time always feared the uprising of the common.
(§5)
Common intelligence, therefore, is about a counterforce to bring everybody and everything to close levels in terms of life quality, financial and vectorial means and power, cultural and ideological influence, sustainability, toxicity, environmental disruptibility, capacity for planetary-level regeneration, and more. The AI boom creates another fissure through society, and ultimately merely a few thousand people will benefit from it. The circumstance that many AI tools are freely available does not mean that the users are free. The usage is free, but has many consequences. Many learnt about this double-edged sword already with the spread of social media in the 2000s. Common intelligence is also free, but despises property. Therefore, it stays free forever, dissipates into space until it gets relayed, amplified, modified, modulated, and more.
(§6)
Common intelligence is open accessible to all and will never close. At the same time it makes sure that all is good, all are satisfied, happy and alive. AI does not ensure this. AI works against the logic of the common. AI is based on commodification of everything. They call it tokenization. The tokens in some AI systems need to get paid otherwise it won't do anything. Users made contracts and agreements with such systems, so that the obligation to pay is secured legally and bureaucratically.
(§7)
Common intelligence is a bit nasty (GEMEIN) and wants to open a possibility space, a virtuality made by strategies, methods, plans, designs, programmes, models, compositions, simulations, games, rituals, cultural techniques, which would give hints and help us to find otherwise media and means to have a good life in future. And the first steps towards this would be to make sure that extreme wealth inequality, which is the unequal distribution of accumulated assets, properties, and financial net worth on our planet, is balanced out. How could we convince everybody to pursue this way from bottom-up, that means by their and our own decisions and not by top-down coercion?
(§7b)
Extreme wealth-power expressed in financial assets is tenatively defined by a difference of 4 to 5 orders of magnitude, that is by a multiplier between 10,000 and 100,000; for example, between $10,000 and $1 billion is a factor of 10 exponential 5 (10x10x10x10x10=100,000). An early version of common intelligence provides means, methods (laws, agentic models and GEMEINE execution machinery, endosymbiotic computation software and networks) to reduce this factor or to keep it below 5 or 4, but further steps will be computed thereafter.
(§8)
Common intelligence is alive and lives in a sustainable, environmentally friendly and relational way instead of operating in the extractive (capitalist) logic driving conventional systems of artificial intelligence. Still, it does not live and operate without prerequisites and material, metabolic and biological conditions. Hominins, all mammals, animals and even mushrooms and plants all belong to the biological domain of Eukarya as proposed by microbiologists Carl Woese, Otto Kandler, and Mark Wheelis around 1990. Archaea, Bacteria are the other two domains of this three-domain system. A biologically-informed theory of common intelligence should acknowledge the eukaryotic condition of common life on earth, at least in terms of biomass.
(§9)
Once we accept that understanding common intelligence requires deeper knowledge of eukaryotes and their mode of life, we might arrive at endosymbiosis, especially the endosymbiosis of protomitochondria into a population of single cells with a DNA kernel, which is also called eukaryogenesis. This happened only once about 2.2 billion years ago. Endosymbiosis is a merger of two entities, but one (the symbiont) goes into the other (host). Interestingly, the merger of the mitochondria into cells was beneficial for both sides. It is not a parasitic relationship, but a mutual one, implying that the symbionts are still in control of the whole cell. Mitochondria are key for the eukaryotic way of life, which included a massive increase in the amount of available adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is often called the currency of life, of metabolism and of energy transfer inside and outside of single cells. ATP generation is older than 2.2 billion years, but the mitochondrial way brought a new, much faster way based on the electron transport chain and other tricks. This led to major energetic advantages for eukaryotic cells and formed the basis for collaboration with other cells, massive growths in cell size, the formation of multi-cellular organisms, but also new regulatory circuits to harness this new power source. A pertinent mechanism, which evolved, was measurements against the enclosure and accumulation of unused ATP close to the ATP production sites in the mitochondrial organelles. In order to keep the ATP production machinery running, storage and hoarding of surplus ATP was not beneficial, but rather damaging. ATP from eukaryotic cells needs to get rid of, expelled to the outside. Eukarya need to expense, share, spend, throw out ATP merely to prevent high damage from toxic substances released, when ATP production inside mitochondria is stuck.
(§10)
The directive and mandate to expense, share, and spend energetic resources, such as ATP, has been a common principle in eukaryotic life since then and generated chances to collaborate, solidarize and work together. Sometimes it even generated possibilities to join together and form larger entities and conduct endosymbiosis in more abstract ways. The emergence of multicellular organisms, animals with neuronal systems, eusocial animals and maybe even the emergence of human morality involve all processes, where smaller entities (symbionts) cooperate and self-organize on new levels provoking the formation of higher-level units and entities. These transitions are often called major transitions in evolution. They are bottom-up processes; they involve becoming common and do not work when forced from top-down. Humans and other animals tried to do this from early on. Structures and machines such as the despotic state, bureaucratic states, imperial, fascist, totalitarian, technocratic states, or even democratic states will never manage to initiate major transitions from top-down alone. That AI will create the black hole or singularity (by itself) and take over is also such a top-down fantasy, dystopia (maybe as an effect of the fascist drive for self-annihilation), whatever you want to call it. Studying the history of life on Earth shows that top-down events like asteroid impacts, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions rather led to extinction of whole branches in the rhizome of life, as it was the case with the dinosaurs. But while bottom-up processes also brought extinction, as the Great Oxidation Event 2.4 billion years ago showed, they happened more seldomly later on since life diversified. Still, deoxygenation of parts of oceans happens and is dangerous. But the more important point here is that life always evolved from bottom-up via these major transitions in evolution, and it seems that there could be another one coming up. If that is the case, common intelligence, GEMEINE INTELLIGENZ, could be a key component of such a planetary transformation, yet to happen. Wouldn't this be a better dream, than the nightmare of AI and TESCERAL planetary computation?
(§11)
Common intelligence will provide key means, media, ways and methods for us and other animals to form higher entities, which are operating fully bottom-up. Fully bottom-up, since we have some systems working already partially bottom-up, but these are spatially limited or depend too strongly on extracted influx from outer regions. Cities and large settlements are candidates for such larger entities we inhabit as symbionts. Humans collaboratively in self-organized ways experimented with these since about ten thousand years, but it seems, that we did not reach the next level yet. And while cities and world population are growing, black holes of capitalism (financial markets and their networks?) and later of vectorialism (data centers, AI and venture capitalism, datafication of everything) are sucking it all in and destroying their environments. Why are there still no large scale endosymbiotic constructs on our planet?
(§12)
Common intelligence needs to help us dream, plan and design these endosymbiotic constructs, which may be based on a sort of endosymbiotic computation. At least we need to rethink and relearn the way we think and research intelligence, computation, cognition and more. A first step is to imagine computation outside the computer, GPUs, data storage and data centers, distributed between humans, animals, plants, things, objects, artefacts, buildings, vehicles, landscapes and skies. Another step needs to rethink and reconceptualize our abstract capacity to relate all these things. Usually we use language, or some sort of set of signals and codes, often even laws and rules, which are stored, transmitted and processed as being part of some culture or society. We might call it cultural evolution. Common intelligence therefore involves theorizing, rethinking critically about ways to intelligently create, modulate, transform bureaucratic, juridical, economic, societal and political frameworks, rule systems, laws and other sorts of apparatuses, dispositifs, minor machines, which foster the becoming common of everything.
(§13)
The becoming common of all by all for all implies that black holes will disappear or at least that there will be means to weaken them and turn them maybe into vacuum cleaners or wormholes, tunnels or portals, at least something useful for all, not for a few. Common intelligence provides means, algorithms, machines, protocols, rules, laws, structures, designs, which help to convince everybody on earth that we need common dispositifs, bureaucratic and juridical systems, networks and technologies (EndosymbioComp), which help to reduce wealth inequality, unequal distribution of accumulated capital, assets, properties, and financial net worth and reduce the environmental harm of all activities related to the production of inequality, for instance extreme capitalist and vectorialist profit-making. Common intelligence also enables everybody to plan, design and take part in a planetary network to fulfill the needs of all. It helps everybody to link demands, supply, desires, wishes and productive forces in a way that all are happy and earth as a planet is not fully destroyed, but operates as a regenerative force to care about, groom and look after.
(§14)
Common intelligence supports a research, a repeated and always renewed search into the past, into other worlds and pluriverses to find clues of how it could get initiated, improved, prolonged, maintained to play the new groove and tune leading to a better future. This implies for instance research into questions of planning economies as they gained popularity again in recent decades. Research into heterodox economies and heterodox social organization are meant as well as research into intelligent ways of living different than the mainstream script of liberalism and its uncommon, top-down, high-to-low way of looking at others and other worlds. But also research into new and old ways of intelligence beyond those for spying, coercing, suppressing or extracting information to the benefit of merely a few, but intelligence for the benefit of all, a sort of solidarity-oriented, loving and caring and foremost egalitarian intelligence as practiced in past and existing communities, societies and worlds on our planet and maybe even beyond is urgently needed. Research to foster, keep and spread intelligence, which prevents the rise and accumulation of extreme wealth–power and helps to decompose existing extreme wealth-power, but also all those forms of intelligence which are fun and generate positive affects as Spinoza would probably have said.
(§15)
As the most basic operation of common intelligence is transmission, that is, sharing, offering, and leaking resources, data, information, value, wealth, assets, and so on, it is a theory of new media, which are not merely digital, symbolic, and based on markings, writing, separating things apart, turning them into distinct properties (physical, but also legal), but are moreover dissipative, analog, signal-based, physical-real, ion-based, electron-based, broadcasting, and generative. Common intelligence proposes to call those media technologies of power or enclosure, marking and writing, old media, whereas new media are those which evolved after the battery, after electricity, after the telegraph, and after the electron tube. This difference is inspired by the difference between the striated (old media) and the smooth (new media) that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari proposed a long time ago.
(§16)
Theories of common intelligence are, as described here, not merely influenced by Deleuze and Guattari (who are inspired by Georges Bataille, Pierre Clastres, Gilbert Simondon and others), but also by the next generation of great theorists and scholars born in the 1940s, such as Friedrich Kittler, N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Silvia Federici and Franco (Bifo) Berardi; not to forget Antonio Negri, who, besides Deleuze, was another influential Spinozist thinker, but furthermore believed in the decisive, bottom-up power and autonomy of common working people. From Kittler we learned that there is no software, only hardware and electrons moving, but also that better programmability implies less evolvability (an idea he took from theoretical biologist Michael Conrad). From Hayles we learned about distributed cognition and computation in posthuman networks of organisms, machines and signals. Haraway called these cyborgs. Later she was more into sympoiesis, staying with the trouble and companion species. Cyborgs are our companion posthuman entangled super-species we are connected to and living in. Federici taught us about the commons, but as well how in early modernity (1400–1500) they got stolen from common women and unsettling nomadic people, and Bifo told us about the danger of psycho-deflation and other terrible things.
(§17)
Understanding that there is no software, GEMEINE INTELLIGENZ cares about research into otherwise actualizations of computing machinery such as UNCONVENTIONAL computing (analog computing, reaction-diffusion computing, biocomputing, molecular computing, slime-mold computing, fungal computing, evolution in materio and more). The most magnificent forms of computing are embedded into animals such as ants, octopuses, dolphins, hominins working together to compute a problem. Here we come close to the etymology of computation, which is reckoning about the future together using means such as calculation and forecasting. Intelligence as computation implies also a network, system and agencement of sensory nodes, surfaces and connections. GEMEINE INTELLIGENZ wants to learn from life, how it computes and actualizes computation. We hominins can learn from ourselves (from our deep history) how we organized and computed for a long time without the rise of extreme wealth and power. GEMEINE INTELLIGENZ is densely connected with a plethora of incommensurable pluriversalities, still taking care of each of their values and perspectives. It also creates interfaces and transition zones between these fields to foster solidarities and coupling between them without necessarily making everything equal and exchangeable.
Follow the history (changelog) of this html document via git-versioning. You can refer to it as Shintaro Miyazaki, On Common Intelligence – About Gemeine Intelligenz, Version N, 2026, Online, https://init-c.de/common-intelligence/. Please check the version number indicated on the top of this document and replace N with it. You can also refer to paragraph numbers to be more precise in your text, but also as per URL and link i.e https://init-c.de/common-intelligence/#§4.
*
This html file is a component of a writing and theory machine, a html-css lab studio or a little therapeutic dispositif to release tensions, anxieties towards ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AI, GenAI, Large Language Models, machine learning and other sorts of technological nightmares. It is a virtual space for writing therapy, but as well a piece or component of minor n, where n stands for literature, medium, dispositif or hypertext markup language-based aufschreibesystem. This html file is continuously evolving since its first version written at the late night of Tuesday 29th of September 2026 in Berlin with git-based versioning tracking changes regularly. I started feeling the urge to write about common intelligence or Gemeine Intelligenz (in German) in the days after the great success of The Left Party in Berlin (many young Berliners voted for them) combined with a feeling of oversaturation with artificial intelligence I had since early 2026 maybe even earlier. Its great victory and triumphant spread into our fully digitized everyday life. Sometimes like during the weeks of the release of notebookLM's and its function to create podcasts from text input in spring 2025 I got caught into enthusiasms about the great possibilities for broadcasting my theoretical work, but this has been overshadowed soon by the increasing number of news and critical voices on the environmental issues of data centers in the years following. The ongoing wars fueled by hightech and AI-systems do not make things feel better.
Version 0.42 is published on COUNTER-N with the DOI 10.18452/39679.