I’m new “here” so please excuse me if I didn’t phrase my proposition to your standards. (Do tell me if anything’s wrong with it)
The following has been keeping my mind occupied :
If a group of an organism (E.g. Ants) is to be considered to increase in it’s ability to make intelligent decisions if the group increases in size and the way humans are growing more interconnected (thus our “group” increases) whilst seemingly not growing in this ability.
Would this mean that said group is not capable of realising it’s potential and could this also imply that humans seem to lack this ability ?
Personally I find the lack of scientific breakthrough’s worrying although our ability for communication increase and everywhere seem to pop-up groups of like-minded people (Hacker spaces , DIY Biological labs etc)
The intelligence of a group is entirely an issue of the rules which govern the group. A group of monkeys with the right rules in place can solve problems that human’s cannot solve except by having similar rules. A mind and a society are abstractly the same thing. Each requires a system by which it solves problems (the definition of intelligence) through cooperative interaction between subordinate components.
I think human collective intelligence is accumulative; if you ask yourself ‘why didn’t the industrial revolution occur earlier’ or ‘why did people buy British Leyland cars’ then the answer is that we didn’t know how or why. Now we look back on all the bad cars of the past and wonder why we bought and admired them. This is because it takes time for societal recognition of the fact that a perfectly [ehem] functioning vehicle which you thought looked new and cool, is actually shit and not cool.
People in e.g. the ancient Greeks were probably quite capable of the industrial revolution in terms of intelligence [same as us individually], but it required the accumulative informations from clockwork to get mechanisms for weaving machines which began the industrial revolution, and the Greeks were only at gears [i think the Chinese invented clocks?]
They seem to lack this ability, yes, but they do not really lack this ability. The abilities of human beings are too complex, so if there are, for example, two neighborly human groups (e.g. “X” and “Y”) and the human group “X” does “x” and the human group “Y” does “y”, then it is very much probable that one of this two human groups will sooner or later change its doing, unless these two groups are isolated from each other. Huamn beings have far more possibilities of doing or behaving, far more capabilities or skills than e.g. ants. Ants are great specialists - but they do always the same.
Coolness is not an issue (at least not for me) when it comes to buy a car. The old cars (e.g. those of the 1960s) were already perfectly functioning cars - coolness and too much electronics have nothing to do with perfectly functioning but merely with luxury. So when it comes to have perfectly functioning cars, cars with too much electronics (gps and so on) and coolness are not needed and oftener defect than the older cars were and are (!). Cars with too much electronics show what the future will be all about - therefore my question again: Will machines completely replace all human beings?
True. Most restorers change the brakes on old cars because they were a tad dangerous though. But the point was about change and how we miss things/faults but collectively they get spotted and issues resolved.
Yes self driving and otherwise safer cars, you know to stop all the death and injury. Not to mention flying cars, you wouldn’t want them to be unsafe would you! so the whole thing needs to move along and that is what collective intelligence and the exponent of invention does ~ which is the point of the thread and not aesthetics.
Intelligence refers to (a) one person and (b) a group. A group needs very intelligent persons who are able to lead the group and to promote intelligence in the group, so that the group can become more and more intelligent. So intelligence itself must be promoted when it comes to the goal of an intelligent group, and this can best be done by very intelligent leaders.
A group of dummies can be given a set of rules, programmed into obeying them and become a highly intelligent entity as a group, even though the individuals are still dummies. Of course, it would be even better for those rules to be increasing the intellect of the dummies as time goes on. That is what the SAM groups do. With a SAM organization, the entire entity is intelligent beyond any one member and also every member is being trained to be more intelligent (and wise) as time and experience unfolds.
Yes, all intelligence requires structure. If no one wants to cooperate with the required structure, the group is more stupid. That is the whole point to real terrorism, to get people to not cooperate due to fear such that the group can no longer function as an intelligent entity.
I don’t think you can separate out the individual ants from the group. They are each made to be part of a larger organism, the ant hill, for example. They are born with different functions and these functions only work, even at basic levels, if they are part of a larger group. They have very little flexibility as individuals, work tightly in their roles. Part of the advantage and disadvantage humans have is that they can come at issues from a wider range of approaches. They can also shift roles, create roles, refuse roles. And this leads to all sorts of creativity - taken in a very broad sense - with all the attendant advantages and disadvantages on the individual and group levels.
How did you determine there is a lack of scientific breakthroughs? What did you compare the amount of breakthroughs we do have with?
I think the current interconnectedness, that maintained by technology, creates an opportunity for some and some groups, but overall is reinforcing our antlikeness. It allows people to be interconnected in ways that distract and unify them and creates a detachment and dumbing down, despite also offering more interesting kinds of connecting.
When the members of a large group make it their life’s mission to focus and cooperate on a distributed set of small coordinated tasks, it creates the semblance of an intelligent super-organism, a transcendent whole, a “hive mind,” making singular decisions.
Much like certain corporations, governments, and multinational movements.
The intelligent-like complexity that emerges is perhaps as much or more the result of the scale of adaptive task coordination than of group size alone.
I find the forbiddingly overwhelming amount of published data impossible to digest. I worry there is too much stuff and too little attention to spare.
It isn’t always the most life-changing information that gets amplified in the air waves…sometimes it’s a naked butt, or a blue dress, or one man’s self-identification as woman.
If a paradigm-altering breakthrough falls in forest and no one can hear it over the sound of a million screaming Justin Beiber fans, does it make a sound? Does it not exist?
Intelligence is the issue here. One type of intelligence has to do with the capacity to think independently of actions performed in accordance with structural signifiers, it is less behavior dependent. The other type is much more dependent, more automatically responsive to such structure, and imbues behavior on basis of the given social cues, mostly assumed, or wired in.
The latter shows a very significantly ‘given’ intelligence of natural phenomenon. Sometimes the two types interact to a degree, sometimes one type trumps the other and retards intelligent development.
