Slime molds are amazing, particularly when these single-celled organisms congregate and start moving as a single body. The analogy with groups of humans is tempting. I suspect that human organizations are distinct entities separate from their constituent people just as a fruiting slime mold is more than its constituent cells.
I was recently reminded of the old Scottish grace, “Some hae meat that canna eat, And some wad eat that want it; But we hae meat, and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit.” Expressing thanks for one’s blessings is a wonderful practice – but what if there’s no one to be thanked?
Ken Liu’s 2012 short story “The Perfect Match” is a disturbing premonition of a world where Facebook is everyone’s personal assistant. What struck me most forcefully, though, was that although a Turing-test-capable personal AI is a key character, and feeding the algorithm drives the plot, the story is told in entirely human terms. There’s no sense, let alone a depiction, of the super-human technology that I imagine is driving everything. (Spoilers.)
This post tries to pull together some of the threads of a conversation with Gabor Molnar and Ramiro Montealegre about orgregores, my term for putatively sentient agents that emerge when large numbers of people are very well connected and have a common purpose. Our discussion focused on corporations.
In “Scious organizations” I speculated that sufficiently large and well-connected networks of people could be conscious, by analogy to neural networks. I’ve been calling them o-gregores or orgregores. One possible rebuttal to this claim is that conscious brains evolved over hundreds of millions of years. O-gregores are ad hoc, human-made networks; while they may have the gross topology of neural networks (e.g. scale-free, small-world), they haven’t been under evolutionary pressure to be conscious. Here's a sketch of a response.
I’d been thinking recently about my exchange with Petri Mähönen around mythical entrepreneurs when I came across a comment about successive pairs of leading actors in Spiderman films falling for each other in real life.
It’s time to revisit what the Tech & Mythology project means for me. There were previous snapshots in July and October 2020, and most recently February 2021.
Mark Gross shared Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2018 New Yorker profile of philosopher Andy Clark with me. That prompted some thoughts about minds and embodiment.
I’ve been trying to imagine the invisible world created by internet apps: something like a video that glitches, showing what lies behind; or visualizing what a dog’s nose “sees” (something I think I saw on the BBC decades ago).
If my speculation that some organizations are emergent, conscious entities in their own right, then super-intelligent aliens may have been among us for some time.
Many things are said to take on a life of their own: corporations, movements, projects, urban legends, accusations, and so on. (For sample sentences, see The Free Dictionary, Longman, and Merriam-Webster.) I’m going to take this literally and assume that human enterprises – notably digital technologies – are not just alive but also conscious. In this way digital tech is a greater-than-human mythological force, that is, a god.
I keep coming back to David Simon’s observation that postmodern institutions like the police department, drug economy, political structures, and school administrations, are today’s Olympian forces. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that US journalism schools leave graduates with hefty student loans; the schools seem to me to be an oblivious if not malevolent deity.
The Wall Street Journal is running a series of articles about Facebook. A couple of days ago Jeff Horwitz described a secret elite of celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users that get special treatment. This made me wonder: if Facebook were a character in a play, how would one describe it?
I’ve been asking people for their favorite stories, and Susan T recalled Tove Jansson's Moomin story in which "the smallest of the small creatures" was asked if it knew a story. At last it volunteered this:
"There was a wood rat called Poot."
That’s about as elemental as a story gets, I think: it’s just character.
