As a tool with both social and cognitive implications, the Internet is electronically weaving humanity into a new mode of being and doing.
The Internet allows us to interact with each other in a state of perpetual asynchrony, outside the logic of place, and against a backdrop of zero-transaction costs.
To an increasing degree, digital technologies are driving humanity towards a renaissance of coordination and cognition.
Embedded in this rebirth of behavior and mores is the possibility humans are becoming a superorganism: “a collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective.”
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Despite recent developments, I think ants still remain the most obvious example of a superorganism with distributed intelligence:
Put a couple million individuals — tiny little brains — together, and they interact according to certain rules that create an emergent pattern. The end result is these fantastic nests. And not only that, these collectives of little brains — if you take a picture of the brain, a brain consists of a couple million or billion neurons. The members of an ant colony [are neurons that form] a little brain. These are millions of brains connected in a way we don’t understand yet.
This experiment – fitting ants w/ RFID technolgoy – is a mashup leveraging digital and biological systems and represents the iterative nature of cognitive systems:
Bristol Scientists who attached tiny radio transmitters to ants to study how they choose a nesting site say that they are better at house hunting than “irrational” humans.
University researchers fitted radio-frequency identification tags to the backs of the rock ants, which measure up to 3mm in length. The scientists then watched the way that the ants chose between two nest sites to make their home.
Symbolically, it is pretty loaded.
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As the Internet lays the foundation for a digitally interfaced network of human neurons, it will be interesting to see how existing biologically networked superorganisms may get rendered into the digital realm for reference/study.
I’m still not convinced that the vertical integration of natural innovation won’t be revealed once we mimic our way into understanding the stuff that binds purely biological superorganisms.
In the meantime, I think we’ll be hearing much more about ants.
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