For some reason this made me think of the Focused in A Deepness in the Sky - where real general AI isn't possible [at least where we are] so human minds are harnessed to solve problems in a deeply unpleasant way.

Is there a non-dystopian way we can do this? The immediate problems seem to be bandwidth of communication and ability to quickly generate shared culture and jargon.

Are Bridgewater Capital's employees Ray Dalio's focused?

Possibly something like the "priming mods" used by police while on duty in Greg Egan's Quarantine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_%28Greg_Egan_novel%...

Amazon's Mechanical Turk!

AFAIK Mechanical Turk is just getting random people to do stuff for you - the concept of Focus is something else entirely and genuinely quite terrifying.

The book is on my reading list. I guess I'll have to bump it closer to the front, then.

If you haven't read A Fire Upon the Deep I'd recommend reading that first. It's not vital but there are some subtle links between the two that are rather cool (not the shared character, more the shared "physics" and tech).

That's actually a really interesting idea. At this point you're basically replacing the "policy" neural network in AlphaGo with biological human neural networks.

> have them evaluate that particular sub-tree

Is there a meaningful response that each one could give that would be optimal? I figure this would only stand a chance of working if the pool of humans were cloned from a 9 dan :-)

Each one needn't give a 9 dan response. Each person gives one response to the best of their ability, and scores the situation on a scale of like 1–100. Collect all the responses and distribute the new board situations over the same – or a different – group of people. The score is mostly used to value the quality of previous moves. If a branch leads from a situation most people rated as 60 to a situation where most people rate 10 it's not a good branch.