Centralized power system is always changed by the power of its members. While it changes its members it is also changed by its members. This is a constant presence in all power centralization.

Openness allows the centralized power system and its members to formalize and control this power exchange. Openness makes this power relationship transparent and improves the benefits for both centralized power and its members.

Without openness, a closed centralized power system is still changed but most likely in a damaging way, which then also corrupts the effect over its members.

Centralized power systems are always changed by its members, and they have a choice to make it beneficial for all through openness, or make it damaging to all by being closed.

The main purpose of modernism is to reach perfect objective efficiency. All major contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) projects are modernist.

In all major projects AI is used to replace human decision making by reducing it drastically to the most efficient decision making parameters. Remaining parameters benefit the centralized power which designed it, maintaining the main functions of the decision while removing parameters which provided benefits to the members of the system influenced by the decisions. Removed parameters were based on empathy and other human behaviors.

Example is credit score rating which included a human-to-human interviews, but is now completely automated by AI. Human-to-human interviews still included, to some extent, higher level functions such as empathy, wisdom, compassion, relationship. Once automated credit score rating has been reduced to only a fraction of parameters a human used. Such reduction in the decision making process increased the efficiency of the process in the short term.

Mechanical automations applied, for example, in factories, copied and added to human processes increasing efficiency and benefiting all members of the system. However, AI does not copy the whole decision making process, but actually reduces it drastically by removing higher level human thinking. Such thinking was developed in humans as a safety precaution and a relationship element. Once such thinking is removed, such decision making processes drastically loose value and potentially cause damage.

This is a problem metamodernism and openness should address. Metamodernism as a design method should allow AI designers to fully understand the decision making processes – it their entirety. Such understanding would allow them to prevent or minimize damage by pure modern design.

Openness applied to AI design should be used as a continuous improvement method which minimizes further damage once AI starts engaging.

Diversity of decision makers in a centralized system is not a relevant step towards the equality. It implies indirect limited representation of the specific groups of people by the decision makers who come from those groups of people. However it offers no guarantee that knowledge, wisdom, and decisions of the members of those groups will be included in the centralized power decision process.

Representation as a system of collective decision making is using diversity to extend its centralized distribution of power. Representation, diversity, and openness are many cases placed in conflict because representation and diversity can maintain centralization as is, while openness changes it.

Knowledge can be defined as an ontology. Language is the dominant ontology management method in contemporary systems. It is more effective than imagery and other methods because contemporary systems depend highly on abstract yet precise ontologies. Therefore ontology, knowledge, and language are one in this article and will be presented by the “ontology”.

If a goal of a system is to increase collective intelligence and consciousness, system changes should be observed through ontology changes. Ontology changes between traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism show what kind of language is needed for metamodernism and openness to increase collective intelligence and consciousness.

Traditionalism had a stable ontology. Modernism rapidly expanded the traditional ontology by adding to it and rarely changing it. Postmodernism is mostly focused on changing traditional and modern ontology, adding little to both. Postmodernism depends on closed centralized power to create these ontology changes.

Metamodernism and openness should direct ontology development towards following goals:
– Postmodernism expands instead of changes traditional and modern ontologies,
– Ontology changes are more open and less centralized,
– Adoption of non-binary (oscillating) ontologies.

If ontology development is directed towards these goals a system will experience increase collective intelligence and consciousness growth, and will avoid reductive conflict caused by closed and centralized ontology changes.

The rate of change is accelerating reducing the protection of traditional or empirical knowledge. This accelerated change is called hyper-change. Hyper-change will continue to accelerate. To avoid increase of damage caused by hyper-change it is necessary to apply openness and agility in the hyper-change process.

Openness will allow collection of real-time knowledge which can be used for prevention and reduction of damage. Agility will add controlled stops in the hyper-change process allowing adaptation to the openness knowledge.

Metamodernism is valuable for including all system members, visible and not visible, in openness. Metamodernism is currently the most inclusive approach to knowledge exchange and it decreases overall damage caused by hyper-change.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems with currently available information. Consciousness is the ability to be self aware which enables far more complex problem solving that intelligence. Individual consciousness and collective intelligence are in conflict. There is always a delay between individual ability to understand and the collective ability to create.

Individual humans have the capacity for consciousness, but they can only create real change when as a collective. Also our consciousness – wisdom and abstract thinking – depend greatly on the collective education, exchange, and culture. Culture being a collection of wisdom, often simplified, over hundreds of generations.

In simple words – an individual is smarter than a collective, but the collective is more able than an individual. Also the collective makes the individual smart, hoping that in return the individual slightly increases the collective smart. The main difference being that individual has consciousness while the collective never had and never will have consciousness.

As automation in a system – a collective – increases it should strive towards automating intelligence while it uses more of individual consciousness. Openness is a tool to achieve this. Openness allows individual consciousness to influence the collective intelligence. The more open a system, a collective, is, the more it will use individual consciousness to increase its own intelligence.

Grand narratives, mass media, and hyper-centralized power can not exist without each other. Their total opposites are personal experiences, personal connections, and small group cooperations, such as family. They are extreme sides of the spectrum with many more options in-between.

Our fulfillment requires participation in both extremes and all options in between. We understand the world in narratives and we need all types of narratives – small and grand – to understand our function.

While all narratives can be wrong, grand narratives, mass media, and hyper-centralization are too complex to fix quickly and damage they cause is great. Damage from great narratives is caused by the conflict with personal stories, and between the grand narratives competing for power.

The expansion of mass media is forcing generalization of grand narratives and creating bigger conflicts between personal and grand, and also between different grand narratives. The speed of change is also accelerating and does not allow time for adaptation.

Without hyper-centralization and such high reaching mass media, individuals required much less energy to balance the grand narratives with more personal ones. Changes and conflicts were slower and smaller giving us time to adapt and repair. Now extreme generalization and speed of change are creating internal individual conflicts which do not have the time to be resolve.

Solution to this is openness, which reduces the conflict between grand and personal, but also slows down generalized changes and conflicts. This will give more time to individuals to process the changes and minimize damage.

The ultimate goal of human development are equality and immortality.

Both equality and immortality represent absolute safety of an individual. Equality is safety as a member of a system in social and economical aspect. Immortality is safety from natural harm, including injury, illness, aging. All humans want these two safeties. Immortality is the ultimate goal of technology development and equality is the ultimate goal of power development.

It is unclear at which order immortality and equality should be reached – which should be first. Historically technological resources have increased and decreased inequality, and greater equality has also increased and decreased technological development. If immortality is reached before equality it will surely offer more time for the development of equality.

To reach equality following gradual steps must be made:
Step 1) Openness – some systems allow some influence,
Step 2) Participation – some systems allow some participation,
Step 3) Democracy – all systems allow full participation.

I use the word democracy in its true meaning – full direct democracy accessible to all members of all systems, unfragmented in smaller systems. Only once democracy is reached, then equality can be achieved. It is impossible to have equality if all members of all systems are denied even the slightest participation rights.

Therefore, the ideal human development roadmap is:
Step 1) Openness,
Step 2) Participation,
Step 3) Democracy,
Step 4) Equality,
Step 5) Immortality.

Openness is a quality of a centralized system to allow members and non-members direct influence on its decisions, therefore decentralizing it to some extent for the benefit of both the system and its members.

Influence is defined as data, information, and knowledge shared from individuals who do not make decisions to individuals who make decisions. Openness is a complimentary source of decision relevant information to experts which hold centralized decision power. Example of such systems are ones in which decisions are made by engineers, scientists, managers, product designers, editors, politicians.

Openness informs decisions and minimizes risk of damage caused by insufficient informed. Without openness centralized decision makers can cause damage to some or many members. At the same time openness increases benefits and efficiency of centralized decisions through added information, and it increases member education making acceptance easier.

Openness depends on technologies which enable it. If there are no technologies which directly support it, it is diminished. Reduction of information, like in polls or complex requirements for participation, reduces openness.

Openness also depends on the centralized decision makers ability to use the information: skills, culture, cognitive bandwidth, and management.