MFRS: Christoph Riedl, "Quantifying Human-AI Synergy"

A good team is more than the sum of its parts. This insight seems almost too elementary to lead anywhere new. Yet we keep bumping into the same principle: human groups whose intelligence exceeds their smartest member, human-AI teams that achieve more than either could alone, and multi-agent AI systems that coordinate without direct communication. Synergy is easy to claim but hard to measure: by definition it exists only jointly, so it vanishes the moment we test the parts in isolation. In this talk I explore collective intelligence across different scales and substrates—how we can quantify, explain, and steer it. Information theory gives us the language to make synergy precise. Across every substrate, one ingredient converts parts into a whole—not more capability, not more communication, but the capacity to model other minds. Each time the principle resurfaces, my suspicion grows: all intelligence is collective.