Doug Engelbart (RIP) referred to such phenomenon as "collective IQ" (see: https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/172/) while attempting to adapt the crude nomenclature of his era.

Furthermore it was estimated that each additional perspective, contributed an additional 80 IQ points to the collective IQ, and that this was additive in nature.

JCR Licklider, helped grant (D)ARPA funding to SRI (Stanford Research Institute) after he heard about Engelbart's so-called: "Mother of All Demos" (1968, e.g. https://archive.org/details/motherofalldemos_reel1 ) for NLS (oNLine System, later more widely known as the Intergalactic Network of Computers aka Internet after some less wielding intermediary naming of (D)ARPANet ).

Trivia: According to John Deneen (https://icannwiki.org/John_Deneen) Doug was terminated by SRI after his presentation (apparently SRI's management did not like the diversity of individuals Doug was attempting to include in his research group and tacitly it was understood that once Doug burned through the $250k or so that his grant afforded him in the Augment/NLS group and had given his presentation, they [SRI] would let him go), and was quietly re-hired after JCR Licklider approached them for (D)ARPA funding (so much for management's desires, when more money came knocking at their door!).

Many years later, JCR Licklider dropped such funding after speaking with Doug and being disappointed to hear that the Augment/NLS team had recently hired people (incidentally at the time, I think they were women?) to help train new users. JCR Licklider, apparently believed that A"I" should be training the users in how to use the systems without humans. To paraphrase Engelbart in an interview conducted by Robert X. Cringely many years later recounting that incident : "It's been a few decades since then and I have still never encountered a computer system which could teach its users how to use it without human intervention."

It's probably worth noting that SRI had cross-licensing agreements with SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab) and Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) so it's not as if Engelbart and his collaborators were operating in a vacuum devoid of state of the art A"I" implementations, quite the opposite.

It has been estimated by some that we only ever realized approximately 3% of the vision Engelbart had imagined for NLS. Yet, it seems plainly obvious to me now, as it presumably did to Doug then: real intelligence comes from other living beings, not LLMs and Markov mimicry.

CC: @_elena@mastodon.social