swarm intelligence

dabbled a bit here: swarms – and ant network and 99 and 1 and murmuration and free to fly and (stigmergy ness) – self-organizing

then got a bit deeper while reading Kevin Carson‘s regulated state:

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Swarm intelligence (SI) is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.

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from Hardt & Negri’s multitude p 100 (Michael and Antonio):

p 91

swarm intelligence

from an external perspective, the network attack is described as a swarm because it appears formless. since the network has no center that dictates order, those who can only think in terms of traditional models may assume it has no organization whatsoever – they see mere spontaneity and anarchy. …appears something like… mindless assailants, unknown, uncertain, unseen, and unexpected. if one looks inside a network however, one can see that it is indeed organized, rational and creative….. intelligence fundamentally social.

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the intelligence of the swarm is based fundamentally on communication.

p 92

..understanding swarm behavior helps in writing algorithms to optimize problem-solving computations. computers … process.. faster.. using swarm architecture rather than conventional centralized processing model.

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swarms… emerging in the new network political org’s… are composed of a multitude of diff creative agents. this ads several more layers of complexity to the model.

but not to the individual.. waking up making choices everyday.. their job is to just be themselves..

the members of the multitude do not have to become the sam or renounce their creativity in order to communicate and cooperate with each other. they remain different ….what we need to understand.. is the collective intelligence that can emerge from the communication and cooperation of such a varied multiplicity.

.. Arthur Rimbaud – hymns to the paris commune in 1871 continually imagined the revolutionary communards as insects. it is not uncommon.. to imagine enemy troops as insects…Rimbaud, however, takes this wartime cliche and inverts it, singing praises of the swarm….. music of the swarm. the reawakening and reinvention of the senses in the youthful body – the centerpiece of Rimbaud’s poetic world – takes place in the buzzing and swarming of the flesh. .. a new kind of intelligence, a collective/swarm intelligence, that Rimbaud and the communards anticipated.

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feb 2016

@singularityblog

2/13/16 7:05 AM

Surviving AI, Superintelligence and the Hive Mind – eepurl.com/bQrw6H

So, are we humans doomed to make self-destructive global decisions because of something flawed within us?  Or is the Tragedy of the Commons problem a consequence not of our nature, but of our methods for group decision-making?  An optimist, my view is that our tendency for self-destructive decisions is notbecause of a fundamental human flaw, but because our modern decision-making process is broken – the way we mediate opposing interests, weigh competing alternatives, and converge on final outcomes.  The fact is, our current methods are highly influenced by special interests, the more extreme the position the more attention given, thereby producing solutions that not optimal for the common good.

And the problem is getting worse, for we’ve become a “poll obsessed” society, overusing a crude tool meant for quantifying groups, while forgetting that polls do little to encourage consensus or help groups reach smart decisions that support the common good.  Much the opposite, polls usually are polarizing, highlighting the differences in a population, while encouraging special-interests to entrench.  This is why rational and moral individuals are often unable to agree on solutions that are best for the population at large, even in a democracy that aims to achieve this. Instead, we either stagnate with no decision being reached, or we polarize, entrenching around positions that go against the group’s long-term self-interest.

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So what’s so terrible about a “hive mind?”  I suspect the negative connotations are primarily a consequence of deep misconceptions about bees.  Many people assume that bees are “drones” that take blind direction from an all-powerful queen.  This is simply incorrect.  The queen has no influence on colony decisions.  Instead, honeybees make decisions by convening a swarm of 300 to 500 of their most experienced scouts, who negotiate in real-time, weighing the alternatives in a democratic and thoughtful manner.  In many ways, their process is less “drone-like” than elections held by us humans wherein most participants reflectively vote along party lines, the decisions being made by a small percentage of independents in the middle.  The fact is, bees negotiate and compromise while we polarize and entrench.  I would argue that nature’s “hive minds” are more enlightened than we humans appreciate.