This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Extelligence
Feed Title: Michael Lucas-Smith
Feed URL: http://www.michaellucassmith.com/site.atom
Feed Description: Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life
James kindly found this link about 'Emergent Intelligence'. It is pretty spot on most of the way, except that it presents it all s some new fangled idea :). The concept of a Company or Corporation is entirely this, same with government. The pressing issue is not where or why these hive minds come in to play, but whether they are Thoughtful minds or Thoughless minds.
A thoughtful mind initiates a country wide concept called Recycling. A thoughtless mind initiates a country wide concept of using plastic bags to hold groceries.
One property that does appear to emerge with large hive minds is that latency becomes exponentially higher for node to node communication. Take chinese whispers too - the bandwidth is so high with Humans that the message gets garbled the further it travels.
The 'crowd' mentality has two causes - a single voice up on the podium trying to drown out node to node communication with an all powerful voice commanding the hive mind, or a lack there-of, emotions run hot, the hive mind becomes a slave to itself and riots happen.
Thoughtless minds are like those army ants.. they don't think about where they're going, they just get there. Humans are -terrified- of this concept. The very thought that -we- could be that thoughtless fills us with dread, so much so that we pretend it hasn't and can't and won't and doesn't happen.
The social mind is perhaps the most interesting one. It tends to value individuals over the whole even though our politicians stand up there telling us the whole is more important than the individuals. A conflict between hive minds can cause great tension, so it is often the governments job to try to manipulate the social mind or find a syngery with it. In steps the media, who's job seems to be to cause as much conflict as possible? :) (they are no 'peoples champions', they are a catalyst, the fist clenching because the mind wants to strike, but thoughtlessly, without a target, blind rage, what the buddhists shun).
Let me swing this around to Software. Let's say one day it will be possible to have a large thoughtful hive mind - that will be the glory day of humanity. (I challenge people to give me an example of a large thoughtful human hive mind!, not even the articles scientists engineers example works, because most nodes are thoughtless of their own consequencies (the a-moral scientist delema) or are thoughtless of the concept that their work is part of a greater whole, not their own egotistical triumph).
The age old argument of "There are 1,000,000 developers using Java, therefore we should too.". Conventional wisdom says there is something going wrong there and one should take a closer look at things. Conventional wisdom doesn't explain the -why- though. It's very simple really; that Java community is a hive mind. No matter how many good minds are in it, they will be drowned out by the mass humm of random noise. This is simply a fact of low latency :)
Smaller teams work better? Yes, it is true, because they can combine minds better. Always pair program? Perhaps, but you don't want to drag others down with you :)
My title at work is "Technology Architect". I'm not a coder, not a programmer - here they like the name "Developer", because it means we can stand on our own two feet - we talk to customers, we design, we argue our point.. we even understand business. Are you a programmer or a developer? The nodes used in a hive mind matter -a lot-, especially the ones up top who are only hearing a filtered version of the hive noise.
So why is it we keep hiring people who don't understand these concepts? Who see a big hive mind and think they must submit to its will "We will use Java" - some people are smart enough to see past it and call it "Market place advantage"; but is the advantage because the tool is better or the hive mind is more thoughtful? (we see few fantastic examples of niche Cobol, but we see many great examples of niche ML).
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