Herd behavior Vs. Swarm intelligence.

More and more we see the potential that “swam programing” has.  Juxtaposed, we see more and more how people in the streets act with “herd mentality”. I wanted to clarify what these things mean to me because everywhere else I look, the terms can be almost interchangeable. I for one believe they are two sides of the same coin, however, as one side of a coin is from the other, the definitions for me are on polar sides of eachother's.

According to Wikipedia herd mentality or herd behavior can be defined as the process by which “individuals in a group can act collectively without centralized direction”.

Swarm intelligence on the other hand is defined by wikipedia (to keep it consistent) as the ”collective behavior of decentralized self organized systems, natural or artificial”.

They seems quite interchangeable until one digs a bit further, Herd behavior can “refer to the behavior of animals in herds, packs, flocks and so on, as well as the behavior of humans in demonstrations, riots and strikes as well as  sporting events, religious gatherings, episodes of mob violence and everyday decision-making, judgement and opinion-forming.”

The expression of swarm intelligence  was first coined by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems or AI  (artificial Intelligence). Each individual (natural or artificial) follows very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individuals should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of "intelligent" global behavior, unknown to the individual agents. If one continued to read the definition they will also go to describe that natural systems that operate in this manner are herds, packs, flocks colonies of ants etc.

Now that you see what I have encountered on the internet let me simplify the way I perceive these two decentralized ways of socially interacting.

I describe Herd behavior (also called herd instinct, herd mentality or herd intelligence) is what we do when we are at a crosswalk and before the light changes you catch yourself automatically crossing the street; but why did this happen? Next thing you know, you see someone else whether next to you or even from the other side of the street crossing and you apparently just “sensed it” and went with the flow.

The scottish intellectual Charles Mackay mentioned in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, that “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

Swarm mentality on the other hand, I believe, is a very conscious and deliberate “individual” decision, vs just a visceral or gut reaction. I see this more as a team of people that go into a home in order to remodel it and no one talked to each other before seeing this house. Even though there was no centralized decision making, if you go in and you see that someone placed a couch here you go and place the love seat in a generally acceptable place relative to the couch. Even if you have to move the couch, the amount of change that needs to happen in order for the home to be nice and habitable is not much. In general the “swarm” will decorate, at the very least, a decent home.

This is why I make the distinction of behavior vs. mentality here. If you are not aware of making a decision I believe this constitutes a behaviour and is no longer an “intelligent act”.

In short I believe that herd behavior is an instinctual reaction that results from the local interactions of individuals with each other and with their environment in a physical way, where swarm mentality is the sum total of many individuals making a conscious decision statistically acting in a coordinated manner. 

I have the feeling we will be hearing a lot more about swarm intelligence in the near future. I see big things coming in robotics, in business structures, social cohesion and governance. In the mean time, try to be aware of when you are behaving with heard instincts and think instead.

Days of the Artilect

Most of us have heard that the singularity is coming. But what is the singularity really? The singularity is inexplicable. The best way to start to get a vision of what it is, is that the singularity is a point in humanity’s near-future when technology advances faster than our own cognition. Technology will advance so quickly that it will transcend our ability to be able to understand it. A picturesque way to explain the singularity is to imagine explaining the internet to somebody who lived during biblical times. Your frames of reference would be so different and your lack of knowledge would be so vast that it would be impossible to transmit even the simple concept of what the internet is (let alone how it works) to that person, even if you had at your disposal all the resources of that time period from all around the world.

Many people define the singularity differently which changes the calculations of when it might occur. In general, Moore’s law is used to calculate a date, but however you slice it, interesting things are coming in the near future. Ray Kurzweil calculates it will take place as soon as 2045 (more conservative numbers suggest 2065 which is not too far off either). One thing is for sure, it will happen in a flash. There will only be before and after the singularity. The journalist Annalee Newitz states that “talking about the singularity is a paradox, because it is an attempt to imagine something that is by definition unimaginable to people in the present day”.

There is a logic that has been starting to pick up more and more traction which believes that the singularity will come thanks to an artilect. What is an artilect? An “artilect” is artificial intellect, or Artificial intelligence (Ai). In today’s world we are incredibly advanced when it comes to artificial intelligence. We have robots that can go as far as to come up with the questions like “why do I (the robot) exist?” all by themselves. Does this make them conscious? If not quite yet, they are very close to doing so. The part that Ai developers and roboticists like Ben Goertzel predict will catalyze the singularity is the processing and storing power of these “artificial brains”. Very soon a “computer/robot” will be able to process information much faster than us humans and have an “infinite” and automatic memory of all knowledge not only at its fingertips but with instant recall. This means that not only will it know all the information “in the internet (at least)” but can correlate and process it all automatically (or within seconds)  in an intelligent manner.

Hugo De Garis (another Ai developer) says the artilect war is coming. He coined the term and explains it as the division of humanity for and against advanced artificial intelligence. This is projected to be the most devastating war we will ever see, since it is no longer about money or even a few resources, but about the “survival” of humanity as the dominant species on earth.

One day someone will test out a bit of software and we will no longer be the smartest earthlings around. It won't be like hanging out with Einstein, it’ll be more like we are monkeys and they are humans. At this point we need to hope we created a firm and well balanced moral base. The program will be way smarter than us, let’s just hope it is “better people” than we are and its reasoning doesn't drive it to corrupt itself like we did with the invention of money, possessions or the concept of classism or many of the other nefarious notions, thoughts and theories we have come up with and justified through self-motivated reasoning. Let me be clear, they WILL come up with it, they WILL be aware of it, but just like I have bad thoughts and can reason myself from enacting them, we need to set the filters for these artilects to a way higher standard than the very Buddha had for himself.

In order to be able to forego a “judgment day” scenario (made famous by the hit movie franchise terminator) I think we have to evolve as a society. I think that we need to leave antiquated concepts behind and begin being the very best version of humanity we can. I say humanity, because a single person makes decisions based on its individual circumstances but humanity makes decisions that are good for, not just one but for all, much like the artilect, we are turning into a global consciousness but we refuse to understand that like ants we are in reality all part of something bigger.  We as a society and as a species need to transcend this aggressive and self-centered version of ourselves in order to teach this new “reality or consciousness” through example. We need to evolve into something along the lines of what Jaques Fresco has been talking about for so long, something similar to The Venus project. Not necessarily exactly that, but definitely lean more on Buddhist mentality and truly worship and respect everything in order to now be respected in return.

The artilects will be able to exist and be in more than one body at a time, in more than one place at the time their awareness and consciousness will be greater and more profound that anything we can even imagine. It’s like explaining the 6th dimension to someone, we can explain it and even sort of visualize it through similar concepts but we will never be able to truly see it. Like explaining to a 1 dimensional line that it’s really a 2 dimensional triangle or explaining to a skin cell, it’s part of a human. The awareness that a bad person is like a disease and should be cured is something that can save us. The very ideals of freedom, health and fractal reality need to be truly self-evident to this new consciousness. The reason I say fractal reality is because according to taurus theory or fractal reality theory we are the center of the universe, we are the big bang and we are the very fringes of space and consciousness, we are all. This holistic view on reality might make this Ai a force for good. Like they said in Terminator, you can't avoid Judgment day, you can change the date and push it back for a while, but it is inevitable. What we can do is guide it to be a force for good.

Rafael Michelena