Transitioning the World with Collective Intelligence
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History: Swarm intelligence
Source of version: 6 (current)
! Swarm intelligence
^~~darkblue:
The insect societies have a working model that is very different from the human one: a decentralized model, based on the cooperation of autonomous units with a relatively simple and probabilistic behavior that are distributed in the environment and are provided only with local information (I mean they don't have any representation or explicit knowledge of the global structure they are supposed to produce or in which they evolve, that is they have no plan at all).
Insects possess a sensorial equipment that allows them to respond to stimulations: those that are emitted by their peers and those that come from their environment. Obviously these stimulations are not the same as words or signs with a symbolic value. Their meaning depend on their intensity and on the context in which they are produced; they are simply attractive or repulsive, inhibiting or activating.
In insect societies, the global "project" is not explicitly programmed within individuals, but emerges after the succession of a high number of elementary interactions between individuals, or between individuals and the environment. The collective intelligence gets built from a multitude of individual simplicities.
__Jean-Louis Deneubourg__ - professor and researcher in biological processes and theory of collective processes.
Free University of Brussels~~^
Insect societies (ants, bees, termites…) have become particularly observed models these past two decades. How the only interaction of a high number of individually "stupid" creatures can make emerge an intelligent, reactive, adaptable and in symbiosis with the environment? This is what we call the swarm intelligence. It inspired many computed simulations (((swarm computation)) and ((cellular automata))), all providing fertile discoveries and teachings.
Swarm intelligence is blind because of its lack of holopticism. None of the individuals have the slightest idea of what the emerging entity is. What "stabilizes" and manages social insects societies comes mainly from external conditions (temperature, weather, dangers, food…) that work like a natural "container" and provide the guidelines. Millions of years of evolution were necessary to refine the individuals' behavioral (genetically programmed) array, and that these societies reach the stability and the robustness we know.
It seems that, in mankind, a certain form of swarm intelligence shows up in the economic domain as well. Each time we make a payment, we make a gesture that is rather similar, in its simplicity and its dynamics, to an exchange between to social insects. From the multitude of one-to-one simple probabilistic transactions, a very elaborated collective system emerges, with responsiveness and adaptive properties. This is the way human society manages and balances its resources at the macroscopic level (even though at the local level of ((organizations)), it is the ((pyramidal intelligence)) that organizes the circulation).
!!Limits of swarm intelligence
The swarm intelligence works at the condition its agents are uniform and disindividualized. The latter, anonymous among the crowd of other anonymous agents, are easily sacrificed – event at a large scale – in the name of the global balance of the system. This fact might seem acceptable for social insects in which each individual is undifferentiated, it is of course not acceptable for animal species for which the balance depends on the differentiation of the individuals, in particular in mankind.
Yet this fundamental distinction seems to be ignored by the numerous economic theories that build their models and doctrines on the interaction of undifferentiated agents (the consumer, the citizen). The liberal approach postulates that the system should reach its balance at the macroscopic level by itself, thanks to the action of internal and external constraints (some people will refer to the famous ((Adam Smith))'s expression of the invisible hand). Modeling the human society as a sum of undifferentiated agents – even with random behavioral variations – constitutes an epistemological mistake at the best, a very dangerous doctrine at the worst. Let's add that the human economic system is a very recent spark at the scale of evolution and that no historical nor biological facts can back up the thesis of a so called natural equilibrium.
For this reason, it seems that swarm organization is only a transitory stage, the time for the construction of a new level of complexity that transcends and includes the previous levels. The swarm intelligence that still characterizes the current economic system, either will collapse or evolve toward the next superior level, the one of ((Collective Intelligence)).
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* Main: ((Invisible Revolution|Collective intelligence: the invisible revolution))
* Previous:((Pyramidal collective intelligence|Civilization and the pyramidal intelligence))
* Next: ((Collective Intelligence|From collective intelligences to a Collective Intelligence))
^~~darkblue:
The insect societies have a working model that is very different from the human one: a decentralized model, based on the cooperation of autonomous units with a relatively simple and probabilistic behavior that are distributed in the environment and are provided only with local information (I mean they don't have any representation or explicit knowledge of the global structure they are supposed to produce or in which they evolve, that is they have no plan at all).
Insects possess a sensorial equipment that allows them to respond to stimulations: those that are emitted by their peers and those that come from their environment. Obviously these stimulations are not the same as words or signs with a symbolic value. Their meaning depend on their intensity and on the context in which they are produced; they are simply attractive or repulsive, inhibiting or activating.
In insect societies, the global "project" is not explicitly programmed within individuals, but emerges after the succession of a high number of elementary interactions between individuals, or between individuals and the environment. The collective intelligence gets built from a multitude of individual simplicities.
__Jean-Louis Deneubourg__ - professor and researcher in biological processes and theory of collective processes.
Free University of Brussels~~^
Insect societies (ants, bees, termites…) have become particularly observed models these past two decades. How the only interaction of a high number of individually "stupid" creatures can make emerge an intelligent, reactive, adaptable and in symbiosis with the environment? This is what we call the swarm intelligence. It inspired many computed simulations (((swarm computation)) and ((cellular automata))), all providing fertile discoveries and teachings.
Swarm intelligence is blind because of its lack of holopticism. None of the individuals have the slightest idea of what the emerging entity is. What "stabilizes" and manages social insects societies comes mainly from external conditions (temperature, weather, dangers, food…) that work like a natural "container" and provide the guidelines. Millions of years of evolution were necessary to refine the individuals' behavioral (genetically programmed) array, and that these societies reach the stability and the robustness we know.
It seems that, in mankind, a certain form of swarm intelligence shows up in the economic domain as well. Each time we make a payment, we make a gesture that is rather similar, in its simplicity and its dynamics, to an exchange between to social insects. From the multitude of one-to-one simple probabilistic transactions, a very elaborated collective system emerges, with responsiveness and adaptive properties. This is the way human society manages and balances its resources at the macroscopic level (even though at the local level of ((organizations)), it is the ((pyramidal intelligence)) that organizes the circulation).
!!Limits of swarm intelligence
The swarm intelligence works at the condition its agents are uniform and disindividualized. The latter, anonymous among the crowd of other anonymous agents, are easily sacrificed – event at a large scale – in the name of the global balance of the system. This fact might seem acceptable for social insects in which each individual is undifferentiated, it is of course not acceptable for animal species for which the balance depends on the differentiation of the individuals, in particular in mankind.
Yet this fundamental distinction seems to be ignored by the numerous economic theories that build their models and doctrines on the interaction of undifferentiated agents (the consumer, the citizen). The liberal approach postulates that the system should reach its balance at the macroscopic level by itself, thanks to the action of internal and external constraints (some people will refer to the famous ((Adam Smith))'s expression of the invisible hand). Modeling the human society as a sum of undifferentiated agents – even with random behavioral variations – constitutes an epistemological mistake at the best, a very dangerous doctrine at the worst. Let's add that the human economic system is a very recent spark at the scale of evolution and that no historical nor biological facts can back up the thesis of a so called natural equilibrium.
For this reason, it seems that swarm organization is only a transitory stage, the time for the construction of a new level of complexity that transcends and includes the previous levels. The swarm intelligence that still characterizes the current economic system, either will collapse or evolve toward the next superior level, the one of ((Collective Intelligence)).
----
* Main: ((Invisible Revolution|Collective intelligence: the invisible revolution))
* Previous:((Pyramidal collective intelligence|Civilization and the pyramidal intelligence))
* Next: ((Collective Intelligence|From collective intelligences to a Collective Intelligence))
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