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Out of Control
Chapter 2: HIVE MIND

There are two extreme ways to structure "moreness." At one extreme, you can construct a system as a long string of sequential operations, such as we do in a meandering factory assembly line. The internal logic of a clock as it measures off time by a complicated parade of movements is the archetype of a sequential system. Most mechanical systems follow the clock.

At the other far extreme, we find many systems ordered as a patchwork of parallel operations, very much as in the neural network of a brain or in a colony of ants. Action in these systems proceeds in a messy cascade of interdependent events. Instead of the discrete ticks of cause and effect that run a clock, a thousand clock springs try to simultaneously run a parallel system. Since there is no chain of command, the particular action of any single spring diffuses into the whole, making it easier for the sum of the whole to overwhelm the parts of the whole. What emerges from the collective is not a series of critical individual actions but a multitude of simultaneous actions whose collective pattern is far more important. This is the swarm model.

These two poles of the organization of moreness exist only in theory because all systems in real life are mixtures of these two extremes. Some large systems lean to the sequential model (the factory); others lean to the web model (the telephone system).

It seems that the things we find most interesting in the universe are all dwelling near the web end. We have the web of life, the tangle of the economy, the mob of societies, and the jungle of our own minds. As dynamic wholes, these all share certain characteristics: a certain liveliness, for one.

We know these parallel-operating wholes by different names. We know a swarm of bees, or a cloud of modems, or a network of brain neurons, or a food web of animals, or a collective of agents. The class of systems to which all of the above belong is variously called: networks, complex adaptive systems, swarm systems, vivisystems, or collective systems. I use all these terms in this book.

Organizationally, each of these is a collection of many (thousands) of autonomous members. "Autonomous" means that each member reacts individually according to internal rules and the state of its local environment. This is opposed to obeying orders from a center, or reacting in lock step to the overall environment.

These autonomous members are highly connected to each other, but not to a central hub. They thus form a peer network. Since there is no center of control, the management and heart of the system are said to be decentrally distributed within the system, as a hive is administered.

There are four distinct facets of distributed being that supply vivisystems their character:

  • The absence of imposed centralized control

  • The autonomous nature of subunits

  • The high connectivity between the subunits

  • The webby nonlinear causality of peers influencing peers.

The relative strengths and dominance of each factor have not yet been examined systematically.

One theme of this book is that distributed artificial vivisystems, such as parallel computing, silicon neural net chips, or the grand network of online networks commonly known as the Internet, provide people with some of the attractions of organic systems, but also, some of their drawbacks. I summarize the pros and cons of distributed systems here:

Benefits of Swarm Systems

  • Adaptable -- It is possible to build a clockwork system that can adjust to predetermined stimuli. But constructing a system that can adjust to new stimuli, or to change beyond a narrow range, requires a swarm -- a hive mind. Only a whole containing many parts can allow a whole to persist while the parts die off or change to fit the new stimuli.

  • Evolvable -- Systems that can shift the locus of adaptation over time from one part of the system to another (from the body to the genes or from one individual to a population) must be swarm based. Noncollective systems cannot evolve (in the biological sense).

  • Resilient -- Because collective systems are built upon multitudes in parallel, there is redundancy. Individuals don't count. Small failures are lost in the hubbub. Big failures are held in check by becoming merely small failures at the next highest level on a hierarchy.

  • Boundless -- Plain old linear systems can sport positive feedback loops -- the screeching disordered noise of PA microphone, for example. But in swarm systems, positive feedback can lead to increasing order. By incrementally extending new structure beyond the bounds of its initial state, a swarm can build its own scaffolding to build further structure. Spontaneous order helps create more order. Life begets more life, wealth creates more wealth, information breeds more information, all bursting the original cradle. And with no bounds in sight.

  • Novelty -- Swarm systems generate novelty for three reasons: (1) They are "sensitive to initial conditions" -- a scientific shorthand for saying that the size of the effect is not proportional to the size of the cause -- so they can make a surprising mountain out of a molehill. (2) They hide countless novel possibilities in the exponential combinations of many interlinked individuals. (3) They don't reckon individuals, so therefore individual variation and imperfection can be allowed. In swarm systems with heritability, individual variation and imperfection will lead to perpetual novelty, or what we call evolution.


Apparent Disadvantages of Swarm Systems

  • Nonoptimal -- Because they are redundant and have no central control, swarm systems are inefficient. Resources are allotted higgledy-piggledy, and duplication of effort is always rampant. What a waste for a frog to lay so many thousands of eggs for just a couple of juvenile offspring! Emergent controls such as prices in free-market economy -- a swarm if there ever was one -- tend to dampen inefficiency, but never eliminate it as a linear system can.

  • Noncontrollable -- There is no authority in charge. Guiding a swarm system can only be done as a shepherd would drive a herd: by applying force at crucial leverage points, and by subverting the natural tendencies of the system to new ends (use the sheep's fear of wolves to gather them with a dog that wants to chase sheep). An economy can't be controlled from the outside; it can only be slightly tweaked from within. A mind cannot be prevented from dreaming, it can only be plucked when it produces fruit. Wherever the word "emergent" appears, there disappears human control.

  • Nonpredictable-The complexity of a swarm system bends it in unforeseeable ways. "The history of biology is about the unexpected," says Chris Langton, a researcher now developing mathematical swarm models. The word emergent has its dark side. Emergent novelty in a video game is tremendous fun; emergent novelty in our airplane traffic -- control system would be a national emergency.

  • Nonunderstandable -- As far as we know, causality is like clockwork. Sequential clockwork systems we understand; nonlinear web systems are unadulterated mysteries. The latter drown in their self-made paradoxical logic. A causes B, B causes A. Swarm systems are oceans of intersecting logic: A indirectly causes everything else and everything else indirectly causes A. I call this lateral or horizontal causality. The credit for the true cause (or more precisely the true proportional mix of causes) will spread horizontally through the web until the trigger of a particular event is essentially unknowable. Stuff happens. We don't need to know exactly how a tomato cell works to be able to grow, eat, or even improve tomatoes. We don't need to know exactly how a massive computational collective system works to be able to build one, use it, and make it better. But whether we understand a system or not, we are responsible for it, so understanding would sure help.

  • Nonimmediate -- Light a fire, build up the steam, turn on a switch, and a linear system awakens. It's ready to serve you. If it stalls, restart it. Simple collective systems can be awakened simply. But complex swarm systems with rich hierarchies take time to boot up. The more complex, the longer it takes to warm up. Each hierarchical layer has to settle down; lateral causes have to slosh around and come to rest; a million autonomous agents have to acquaint themselves. I think this will be the hardest lesson for humans to learn: that organic complexity will entail organic time.

The tradeoff between the pros and cons of swarm logic is very similar to the cost/benefit decisions we would have to make about biological vivisystems, if we were ever asked to. But because we have grown up with biological systems and have had no alternatives, we have always accepted their costs without evaluation.

We can swap a slight tendency for weird glitches in a tool in exchange for supreme sustenance. In exchange for a swarm system of 17 million computer nodes on the Internet that won't go down (as a whole), we get a field that can sprout nasty computer worms, or erupt inexplicable local outages. But we gladly trade the wasteful inefficiencies of multiple routing in order to keep the Internet's remarkable flexibility. On the other hand, when we construct autonomous robots, I bet we give up some of their potential adaptability in exchange for preventing them from going off on their own beyond our full control.

As our inventions shift from the linear, predictable, causal attributes of the mechanical motor, to the crisscrossing, unpredictable, and fuzzy attributes of living systems, we need to shift our sense of what we expect from our machines. A simple rule of thumb may help:

  • For jobs where supreme control is demanded, good old clockware is the way to go.

  • Where supreme adaptability is required, out-of-control swarmware is what you want.

For each step we push our machines toward the collective, we move them toward life. And with each step away from the clock, our contraptions lose the cold, fast optimal efficiency of machines. Most tasks will balance some control for some adaptability, and so the apparatus that best does the job will be some cyborgian hybrid of part clock, part swarm. The more we can discover about the mathematical properties of generic swarm processing, the better our understanding will be of both artificial complexity and biological complexity.

Swarms highlight the complicated side of real things. They depart from the regular. The arithmetic of swarm computation is a continuation of Darwin's revolutionary study of the irregular populations of animals and plants undergoing irregular modification. Swarm logic tries to comprehend the out-of-kilter, to measure the erratic, and to time the unpredictable. It is an attempt, in the words of James Gleick, to map "the morphology of the amorphous" -- to give a shape to that which seems to be inherently shapeless. Science has done all the easy tasks -- the clean simple signals. Now all it can face is the noise; it must stare the messiness of life in the eye.

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