Are you smarter than an ant swarm?

grid and not having any contact with people. Unless you're doing that kind of life, you're probably part of of the machine or a machine. Yeah, Like I got up

this morning, got got into Marta. Suddenly I'm in the I'm in the crowd with the with the with the other commuters, and I'm instantly part of something that It's kind of like a big animal, like a big super organism, a big cranky, uh, kind of stinky superganism that crams itself into trains and delivers itself to the front door of its respective workplaces where it becomes part of another super exactly. Yeah, I mean yeah, just like us How

Stuff Works, Discovery Communications. It's a giant thing and we're all just like parts of it. We're part of the hive. Yeah,

and we're not I'm not. Aga'm not saying that as a as any kind of a slam on on Demand or on Corporate America or any anything like that, because it's it's the more we look, it's like, no matter where you are again, unless you're living in the desert and that's in that shack or or you know, or up in an isolated apartment on the upper east Side with the tinfoil over all the windows, you're a part of some sort of social animal. Right, you're part of

a community. We call it a community. Right now, bees do it, we call it a swarm. If ants do it, we call it. I guess that's a swarm too, or an army at any rate. Yeah, and uh, when when birds do it and they do it in mass, in thousands and cousins of birds and they undulate over the horizon, we just call that scary because we're like, what is that? It looks like a funnel cloud of birds coming at us,

And then why is it doing that? And beady eyes? Right, my wife finds the the the tongues terrifying on birds, like their black tongues. She's anytime we go to Our Thomas, which is a restaurant here in the Atlanta that birds and cages outside. She's always little freaked out, like the two Cans. Did you know that that guy started the Popeye's chain? And yeah, and Our Thomas is sort of his way of giving back to the community in terms

of healthy food and birds. Interesting, Yeah, there you go, but no, but yes, birds, super swarms, super organisms happen every single day. And one of the reasons they're they're kind of that they can often be unnerving is that it's he gets down to the basic idea that an aunt, a single aunt. There's nothing I can out smart in aunt. Most people can't. Everybody can can out smart And then you can take a magnifying glass too and burn it too. If you were a three year old who a single bird,

you can take that on with a tennis racket. Um,

if it's bees, one b is not an issue. But when they swarm, hey, you're dealing with a large mass of things, but also you're dealing with something you can You're suddenly dealing with something that has um an emergent intelligence, that that has a it has it's it basically is it is a macro intelligence that arises from local interactions, right, and not merely simple interactions, uh you know that are necessary to coordinate movement, but a group intelligence that learns

that achieves goals, and it engages in an overall self preservation Okay. And that's what I think is so cool about super organisms, like you said, on their own as individuals and they're a little worthless right in the in the insect community, but together they can accomplish incredible things.

And it's still somewhat of a mystery to scientists. I mean, they've begun to figure out why birds and swarms of thousands can uh turn themselves into these crazy vortex um circular shapes and and not run into each other or drop dead in collision, you know. Yeah, Or or like fish that that sort that get into a swarm and it kind of looks like a single thing, like a single larger sea creature. Yeah, which is so cool. If you've never seen footage on that before, it's really worth

checking out. Um. But but again it's pointing to that sort of intelligence which is far superior than any individual one. Yeah. In in Steve Johnson's book Emergence, which deals with this and so generally regard is a really good uh introduction to to all this. Uh he uh. He lays out like a few uh necessary items on the checklist for emergence intelligence. One of them is a critical massive participation.

So you need a like a minimum number of participants in a social group for like, like like if I was in Marta and it was like three dudes, Uh, there's not really gon be much of a It's it's kind of like a mob, you know, like like if three guys are standing outside of a of a business protesting that people aren't gonna say there's a mob out there.

There's no telling what it'll do. No, it's just like Joe, Charlie and Mary and you can sort of deal with them on an individual basis and there's there's not going to be that that thing that takes over um well, and even in riots, right, there seems to be some sort of self organizing aspect to it. Right. Yeah, there's been a there's been some really interesting stuff coming out recently talking about the at the time of this recording,

current protests in Egypt. You know, because it gets down to like you can't with a with a group like this, you can't say oh, there's the leader. No, there are money leaders there that are that have sort of organizing roles in it, But you can't. That's I mean, that's why the mob is such a scary prospect to any um seat of power, because what does it want? You can't. It's it's you're dealing with it with an intelligence that can't be boiled down to a single individual, right right,

that's right. You can't appease that one single individual. And yet there's an intelligence that comes from that, and there are demands that come from that. Yeah. Like like I would like to just to think back to like a corporation, like like any kind of corporation or big business, Like what motivates everyone? Like the lowly creative type may just

want to make something they can feel proud of. The the sales rep might be motivated by, you know, inner department competition, who can get the biggest sale, who's gonna be the top seller? Um, who's gonna get yelled out by Alec Baldwin? Uh. The account it may just have eyes on you know the bonus uh, and the CEO is you know, it might just be chasing the American dream of filling his solid gold submarine with Brazilian supermodels and circus pandas you know, Yeah, that's it's it's it's

within their grass. So so yeah, but when you talk about the corporation as a whole, like what does it want? What? You know, you're dealing with a different set of of of of goals. Yeah, that parallels are there, right, I mean, because there's a certain kind of intelligence that that happens

when you put a group of people together. I mean that come up with solutions that you might not have come up with yourself, or that people collaborate on and all of a sudden, you've you've created a thing, right now. Other items on Steve Johnson's list a local focus, even

if the effects are more widespread. So like the local focus of of a corporation might be just to you know, you may just boil it down to making money or you know, or getting uh you know, or if it's like a nonprofit, it might be to you know, to bring about a certain social change, or to get certain legislature passed. In the in the event of a protest, it may be to alsta a particular individual or to

or to oppose a particular unpopular um law or ruling. Um. Then another item on this list is random interactions between groups and individuals outside. Uh so this is necessary for a learning process. You know. It's it's like the mob pushing. It's like you know, any kind of scene where it's like the man with his police and his and his riot shield olds on one side, it's the protesters on the other, and there's like a there's kind of a push.

There's a testing of the of the two sides. As as the mob is is learning, it's seeing what it can it can get away with, what it can do, Yeah, learning what his boundaries are. And um, you know there's some there's so many people on the lookout and they're

all gathering data and pulling it in one way or another. Right, which is the same thing if you look at and some with some insects, with some species that they're all kind of like ants, for instance, they're communicating with pheromones, right, and they're basically they're saying, Okay, hey, I'm going to leave this chemical trail to this food source that I just found. And then all of a sudden, you've got one ant following that, five ants, ten ants, a thousand ants.

And that's how you're getting this sort of group movement toward that food source or the bara metric pressure drops for instance, and the ants start building these little sand turrets to protect themselves from what they think maybe rain in pretty soon. So again, it's that collective information and sharing of it and this self directing movement that comes out of it that's so fascinating. Yeah, with ants, it's important to note and just to remind everybody, they're they're

like twelve thousand uh known ant species. They've been ruling the earth for about a hundred and forty million years and uh. And while an ant colony or or or even like a bee hive will have a queen, these are not rulers. Like the queen plays an important reproductive role in a in a in a hive or colony, but they're not calling the shots. Now. She's just a cog in the wheel. Right. Yeah, we we label them a queen and that comes with certain certain anthropomorphic baggage.

But just leave that baggage behind, because the queen is just there to to pump out more more bees or ants. Right, that were just that they she's just useful her for her ovaries. Really to throw it down to that and that's true of all these species, right, the insects species that that show emergence. Yeah, there's no one leader, there's no boss. Yeah. She's not saying, hey, I've got an

idea how to solve this problem about food foraging. No, it's it's it's emerging from the the the interactions of the group as it pushes against outside stimuli and what the group needs. Yeah, there's an interesting study from US Stanford University's Deborah Gordon. Uh and uh this dealt with with the with particularly with forager ants and figuring the ant colony, figuring out how many foragers it needs to send out. Um. And they found that it came down

interactions between foragers and patrollers. So when a forager has contact with patroller you know looking around, um that they end up passing on these these pheromones. But a forager needs several contacts no more than like ten seconds apart before it'll go out. So there has to be like it's it's like a very simple like you know, uh here here the patrollers coming in, patrollers coming in, and once it like counts off enough pheromones within a certain amount of time, then it knows Oh I need to

go out and collect Okay. So it's sort of like, again, is that mass movement? Right? So once it starts to accumulate all that data from ten of those and it says, okay, that's the direction I need to go in. Yeah. That They concluded that forgers use the rate of their encounters with patrollers to tell if it's safe to go out. Okay, so you know, in case there's like an ant eater out there just gobbling up everything, they won't just blindly

march out into the mall. You know, there's something altruistic about that. It seems you know, again that's that's anthropomorphis morphosizing this. But it does seem like, okay, well I've got your back here, or you know, or I may even die for the cause as I'm patrolling. Yeah, And it's, uh, that was so romantic. I can't have much. It's hard not to get romantic about it. This presentation is brought

to you by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow. Another really interesting part of all this is that but we've been able to to look at some of these systems and learn from them and apply them to, uh, to our own human systems, our own um transportation or delivery UM systems such as UH. There's an industrial medical gas guru by the name of air Liquid and they worked with an AI form firm to develop a computer model based on algorithms that were inspired by the forging behavior of argentine ants.

And this is again the species that we're talking about, the deposits chemical pheromones um and and uses that to dictate, you know, how much how many forgers need to go out to get the food. So air Liquid is able to combine the and the ant approach with other artificial intelligence techniques, throw in data about like the weather, customer demand and all, and they use that to figure out how much how much of their product they need to actually ship out. Okay, and this is based on the

algorithms that they observed. Yeah, okay, based on algorithm on the on the way the ants are handling their problem, and they're able to up with a way to to handle their uh, their distributing needs. UM. And you've heard of void technology before too, which is sort of similar

in that UM BOYD boy. This is bo I D B o I D, which I guess that's sort of a void pronunciation of bird, right, And this is Craig Reynolds who created UM, an artificial life program, and this is a distributed behavioral model to simulate the motion of a flock of birds on a computer. So same thing, right, and nowther space goes back to the the really central human need to make believable batswarms in the movie Batman. Yes, yeah,

actually you're right. I mean that that wasn't why he actually created this UH technology, but that's one of the uses for it. Was c G I s to to simulate something that looked realistic in terms of a flock of bats UM. But what he observed is that each boid is implemented as an agent and moves according to its own understanding of the changing environment. So think about bird formations like V formations UM. There are four rules

with this. First, a boid must move away from other boyds they're too close stuff because you don't want to applyde Second, they have to fly in a general direction that the flock is moving, okay. Third, they need to minimize their exposure to flox exterior by moving towards the perceived centers, which is interesting if you think about that V formation. I like how your use of BOYD has made you pronounced toward more toward. Of course, that's why he came up with his name. He's like, this is

totally going to screw the podcasters in the future. I'm just I'm taking the spirit of it, you know, I'm running with it. UM. And then fourth, a boyd should move laterally away from any boy that blocks its view. So I mean that's very simple, right, taking the forcible rules in creating UM. This this algorithm UM that has also been used by Southwest Airlines. Uh, They've got a routing system that in which the pilots try to find the best airport gate based on the group information coming in.

So again you've got the group intelligence aspect of it. Yeah. It's kind of like ants figuring out which entrigued is the colony to take when returning home. Yeah. Yeah, And it's a little bit scary with with you know, with the plane, just because you think, okay, I'm relying on the group intelligence for this, But over and over again, there's so many different studies and counting jelly beans, you know,

guessing the weight of something. Yeah, like the just the basic like second third grade activity of getting all the kids to to guess the jelly bean number. And then everybody comes up with these totals, and some kids maybe way out, some kids don't know what numbers are, and they're like, you know, drawing a cat on the ballot. But but when you put them all together and you you get you get an average. You can estimate estimate more or less exactly how many there are in there.

The mean of right, the mean of that the group estimate is always closer or the closest to what it actually is, which is astounding. The main key here is that you want a diverse members, you want independent minded members, and you want a mechanism of voting or averaging to figure out how it works. Right. Okay, you don't want like fifty engineers all in the same room, right, I mean you actually want it to be a diverse population of people. Um. I mean, you could have fifty engineers

in a room. But the point is is that it doesn't it doesn't really matter. You have people from all social all sort of so so economic strata um giving their information, and the mean will always be more accurate. It's kind of like the whole how many blank does it take to fill in a light bulb? You know? Because I mean it's always a joke about like how many you know, how many hipsters, how many mechanics, how many you know blondes or whatever? Um, you know, does

it take? And it's kind of the message is kind of if you get all, if you don't have a diverse group, they're not going to be able to fulfill even a simple task to the best of their ability. But if it were a priest, a rabbi, and uh whatever the third one is, then hey, they were an engineer, an engineer, then they'd have that light screwed in no time. That's right. Yeah, it takes up the logic. I guess it's the point of all emergence here. Um, I mean

it really is. It's like it's such a simple construct, but it really has changed the way that we think about intelligence and the way that we operate in our own society and uh, the sort of meaning that we ascribe to CEOs or kings or presidents. Um, if we all are essentially self organizing, uh like ants, then and we don't necessarily need a leader, and of course we

need it like psychologically. Right, Um, we're still gonna be okay because we're gonna still come out in theory, um with something that makes sense for our community, right because we're gonna be acting in our best interests. There's along those those lines and kind of taking him to a slightly more troublesome territory. Um, there's the guy, a guy by the name of John Robb. He wrote a book called The Brave New War, and he has a really

cool blog called Global Guerrillas. And he made an interesting point where he pointed to the insurgency in a rack in Iraq is a kind of emergence intelligence, uh, he said. Quote. He talked about it as quote a complex series of local interactions that leads to shifts in its behavior that reflect a complex learning goal attainment and self preservation despite

a lack of a leadership hierarchy. Uh And and he boils this down into three like key facts about the insurgency in I rock that one the insurgency will continue to improve over time to breakout as possible, and three that it is impossible to discern the motives of this movement.

So uh, I found that interesting commentary, you know, because it's it's the idea that you're not you're not fighting a single individual that as much as is everyone like to you know, believe it's like, all right, this this guy, let's find him, uh kill him or or you know, overthrow him, and it's then it's done. But no, you're dealing with a I mean, ay, you're dealing with a

far more complicated social and political situation. But also you're you're dealing with a movement that doesn't doesn't have a leader. That's uh, it's you're dealing with the emergence intelligence. And again it's how do you figure out what that wants?

And is the second point to break out is that the aspect of almost like when with a bird flock, where it all of a sudden it changes direction and then you know, we maybe have the movement of several birds and then that prompts um the other ones to sort of follow domino like yeah, or like with you know, sometimes you'll have like whales that will watch upon the beach because one has kind of like had gone has

gone haywire, and the others just follow. UM. This technology is also being used with robots of course, right right, artificial intelligence. UM. It's based on the collective behavior again of decentralized self organized systems. Just to throw that out there again and again it's identifying best solutions and communicating them.

So they're they're hoping to have this same sort of behavior in robots UM, and how it could be applied is that you could use something called morphogen morphogenesis UH to create a group of robots that can reconfigure and

undertake different functions. For instance, you could have a group of ten robots that may communicate among each other by admitting different color lights, and that light it's say if it's green and blue, could mean that the other robots need to attach to each other and create some sort

of formation. And the formation could be to traverse some sort of gap in the landscape if that's what the robots were doing, or could become up exactly, it becomes a stack up on each other UM, or it could be used to form a shovel shape to push a heavy object. So they're trying to use again that swarm technology there. But more interestingly I think that UM in Georgia, at Georgia Tech of course, where they're doing tons of

crazy stuff with robots and creating robot armies. UM they've developed palm sized robots to use in combat zones, and they're smart enough to go up on their own and alert you when they find something. So they're trying to figure out how best to have these bots interact with each other, and right now it's looking like the research is favoring a decentralized approach in which the individual robots would share information among their companions to form a more

complete picture. So what are we talking about here? Emergence intelligence? Right? Yeah, so I mean here you go again, robots, emergence intelligence, intelligence, emergence intelligence, military intelligence. I guess you could say that. Yeah. Yeah, So you know, anytime we talk about robots, which I know we've been doing a lot lately, we we sort of get a little bit depressed because we think, oh god, they're they're being programmed to destroy us again, or destroy

someone or do something. But I think that, um, the really cool thing about emergence is that it could actually lead to a better understanding of our own human nature. Right if we apply that sort of intelligence to ourselves.

And I am not saying that we don't need presidents, CEOs or power structures are hierarchy in place, Yeah, because without the CEO, the people who make the Golden Submarines are not going to make a living, right, It's very important, Yeah, I mean, the economy will go down and it'll be it'll be a bad thing. Um. But I think that it's interesting to think that we've got the knowledge that we are self directing and there's something comforting in that and that. Um. You know, maybe again here I am

romanticizing things, but romantic in this one. Um. But given the chance, maybe we could bring up the better angels of our nature. Yeah, as we we figure out how to make a machine culture work, we can see how we should actually make a human culture work. Right, I dig it. Okay, we'll go with it. Let's put it

into place. Hey, So let us know what you think if you've seen some some cool examples of emergence intelligence in the people around you and the animals around you, or or the company that you're a part of, or or or even in machines and robots, let us know that's right. And if locust start converging, don't worry. They're just they can't help it. That's what they do. Yeah. I don't hate the individual locusts. It's uh, you know, the mob been taught. So hey, I have a couple

of listener mail items here to read. The first comes from Lisa and This was left on our Facebook page. Um. She says, I like to listen to your podcast as I fall asleep, which is great, it helps me sleep. I listened to it again once I'm awake while I learned the stuff while I'm asleep. The side effect to all this really strange and scary dreams. So sorry about that,

which it'll happen. I, Um, I forget if I mentioned this, but when we were researching our podcast on I was really reading that and researching it right before bed and I had a bunch of crazy dreams with like atomic tests going on on a college campus, and it was it was kind of unsettling. Yeah. Yeah, I have to say I haven't been able to access my dreams lately. That's probably a good thing. Yeah, because it's just loaded with robots running away. Yeah, robo Nanny's and uh robot

locus cool. I have another uh uh. This one is an email from our listener Chris, and he says, I just want to tell you that there are several types of deafness in your podcast. The werewolf principle. You sayd that deaf people don't get motion sick. That would only be if they had neural deafness deafness. There are two basic types of deafness, neural and conductive. The neural deafness is when the cochlea doesn't send the sounds to the brain because the cochlea isn't working or the cochlea is

missing um. The conductive hearing loss is when the sound doesn't get to the cochlea. This occurs when the little bones in the ear uh malius incas and states don't send the sound to the cochlea or the ear drum is missing. If you are going to make people death, you would have have to uh do something to the cochlea or the malius incas or Stapus. Just wanted you to know, so, all right, cool. I should have maybe looked up the pronunciation and all those things through that email,

but I felt like you were going Latin there. It's kind of exciting. Yeah, So hey, if you have anything to uh to let us know about, you can drop

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