Human collective intelligence depends on transmission processes: who shares what with whom, how, and when. While these processes emerge from individual cognition, they can also be directed by deliberate top-down protocols. Prior work has studied how transmission shapes collective outcomes primarily through the lens of network structure, varying who shares with whom and when. But networks are state-agnostic: they cannot condition transmission on what agents know or on the state of the collective. Here, we formalize transmission protocols as state-aware programs that route information and resources based on agent and collective states, and we use LLM-guided evolutionary search to design effective protocols in a collective discovery task. Evolved protocols increase collective performance over standard baselines from the literature by up to 37%. Ablations confirm that state-awareness drives this advantage: removing content-dependence while preserving network topology and timing eliminates performance gains. We find that evolved protocols also transfer across domain variations and agent populations. These results demonstrate that effective and generalizable transmission protocols can be discovered in silico, suggesting a path toward AI-assisted design of coordination infrastructure that enhances human collective intelligence.
Cédric Colas, J'er'emy Perez, Eleni Nisioti et al.· 0 citations
Intelligent machines have the potential to uncover problem-solving strategies beyond human discovery. Emerging evidence from competitive gameplay, such as Go and chess, demonstrates that AI systems are evolving from mere tools to sources of cultural innovation adopted by humans. However, the conditions under which intelligent machines transition from tools to drivers of persistent cultural change remain unclear. We identify three key dimensions that modulate machine influence on human problem-solving: the discovered strategies must be non-trivial, learnable, and offer a clear advantage. Using a cultural transmission experiment, we demonstrate that when these conditions are met, machine-discovered strategies can be transmitted, understood, and preserved by human populations, leading to enduring cultural shifts. Conversely, using agent-based simulations, we show how machine influence is constrained in the absence of these conditions. These findings provide a framework for understanding how machines can persistently expand human cognitive skills and underscore the need to consider their broader implications for human cognition and cultural evolution. AI can uncover problem-solving strategies beyond human discovery. Here, the authors show that AI-discovered strategies propagate and persist in human populations, producing cultural shifts when non-trivial, learnable, and advantageous.
Levin Brinkmann, Thomas F. Eisenmann, Anne-Marie Nussberger et al.· Nature Communications· 1 citation
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