Ambient Communal Intelligence

Ambient Communal Intelligence (ACI) is a proposal, published on the self-driving jazz Substack, for using intelligence technology to help groups of people coordinate. It is ambient because it stays present but in the background, never replacing the parts of coordination that need human care and creativity; communal because it is built to reflect the values of the community and the members it represents; and intelligent because it runs on large language models.

The essay sketches the roles such a system could play: navigation through what a community knows, context about who people are and what they seek, connection between unlikely collaborators, curation of everything a community produces into digests, and administration that quietly takes on the busywork. It rests on three pillars: a central resource directory, identity and governance, and managed agentic infrastructure.

It also names the hard parts: how much process a community will tolerate, physical spaces the system cannot see, out-of-date and conflicting information, over-assumption about people, and privacy. It was written out of organizing Mars College, a three-month off-grid village in the California desert, and ends with an invitation to build these experiments there.