If so let's hope it is at minimum, somewhat intelligent.
From Noema, November 19:
From superorganisms to superintelligences, how studying crabs could reveal that we are unintentionally building an artificial world brain.
One Sunday in April 1930, actors in “little shiny pants” performed an extremely strange play in London titled, “Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth.”
A blurb summarizing the plot stated: “A Brain is constructed in the Sahara Desert — presently It grows larger than the Desert — out of pure mechanism, by the whole of the human race, It controls the whole activities and does all the thinking of the world.”
Written by obscure outsider Lionel Erskine Britton, a working-class intruder within London’s literary elite who had first worked in a factory at age 13, the play depicted the construction of an artificial superintelligence, in the form of a synthetic brain “creeping over the world.”
Humans in the play slowly lose all autonomy and come to function — in strict unison — like neurons making up one vast global ganglion. The play revolted most critics.
But Britton, an ardent socialist with Stalinist sympathies, openly celebrated this imagined future. While he was not alone in predicting something like it, others, by contrast, portrayed it as an oncoming catastrophe.
Whether they were cheered or chilled by the prospect, multiple forecasters imagined contemporary developments culminating in some kind of planet-sized brain that would perform executive function at an intercontinental scale, dictating affairs like a global frontal lobe.
This, after all, was not only an era of collectivism and roiling mass movements. It was also the moment when entomologists were first making popular the notion of a “superorganism.” Just as ants cooperate to forge an anthill — generating a whole far more potent than the sum of its parts — it became pertinent to ask whether globalizing humanity might — intentionally or not — be birthing a new form of planetary intelligence, fathoms more sovereign than any individual or national institution.
What follows is the story of how a century ago, forgotten voices foresaw the present dawning age of synthetic intelligence: envisaging futures wherein humans might cede their role as the apex cogitator and become subsumed within budding systems of nonhuman cunning.
More profoundly, their unease regarding the future of human sovereignty and solidarity rings even truer today. As our climate deteriorates and geopolitical stability crumbles, there have been renewed calls for planetary coordination and control, whether through geoengineering or governance.
We live in an era when pathogens and emissions make a mockery of national borders, when consequences cascade and harms are no longer solely local. Accordingly, disquieting questions arise again: Can liberty survive in an age of planetary risk? What might agency look like in the era of thinking machines?
Visions of a planet artificialized by intelligence are not new. Though the future will undoubtedly prove weirder than anyone yet imagines, revisiting some of the stranger tomorrows imagined throughout the past might help us better navigate the present.
The Evolution Of Individuality
In the 1980s, the biologists Eörs Szathmáry and John Maynard Smith began theorizing that evolution has, over the course of its history, undergone several “major transitions.” Each of these involved innovations in what counts as “an individual.” For example, the shift from cells without nuclei to ones with them; later, from single-celled to multicellular organisms; and later still, from solitary hunters to cooperating groups. Each transition, he proposed, produced more potent and complicated forms of life from the fortuitous integration of simpler, uncoordinated entities into a newly coordinating whole.
This entailed sacrificing autonomy for the previously individual parts. No longer the protagonist, they now became a mere means for the reproduction of the wider whole. Where their predecessors could survive and reproduce on their own, such skills now are lost. But, of course, there are benefits to foregoing solitary life.
Look to the mitochondria living within almost all your cells. Their forerunners were once independent bacteria: rugged individuals. Now they operate obediently as intracellular powerhouses fueling and furthering the body politic. If the mitochondria could speak, would they regret their change?
Naked mole rats provide another example. They are eusocial, meaning they cooperate and divide labor. Compared to other rodents their size, they also have minuscule brains relative to their bodies. But, as colonies they exhibit impressive feats of intelligence. Their individual lobes have withered because the true protagonist is the “brain” of the colony.
