Swarm Intelligence

Here is a possible world 50 years in the future, one I think is more likely than the scenario most people expect, which is one huge AI in the sky.

Fifty years from now most AI is invisible. There is nothing to see. It is sort of like air – always there, always on, everywhere. Something you need and use but take for granted. AI is so prevalent we become blind to it.

You don’t need to log onto it, or even to summon it. Rather you inhale it. Instead of a central AI brain, AI is like a gas, composed of zillions of tiny interacting AIs that create an atmosphere. These zillions of minds are like eukaryotic cells in your body, or hundreds of varieties of bacteria in your gut. They form a presence. They are woven together into a vast network of intelligences that create an AI background. This society of AI minds is not so much seen by humans, as it is felt.

Unlike the AI of today, it will be deeply embodied – into robots, vehicles, buildings, and devices. But its embodiment will be so wide, so deep, so pervasive, that it will become the background.

AI might be thought of as a superorganism that is so vast that, like an ocean, it becomes the environment. This environmental AI, like many environments, can become imperceptible to those immersed in it. We’ll only notice it when there is a gap, a disconnection, or it goes down.

Like a coral reef, an AI superorganism will be composed of thousands of species of minds.

Some of these AI minds might be very narrow and dim, just a notch above being stupid, maybe as smart as an insect. Others might be math geniuses. Most sub-AIs will be engineered in the middle to do specific boring and niche tasks.

The chief characteristic of any superorganism is that its power transcends the power of its parts. So the superorganism of AI, this AI environment, will transcend the power of its parts – which will include all the frontier models of the time, and the most powerful specialized AIs for math, or biology, or world building, and the general purpose everyday AIs running the back offices of corporations. Interacting together, these AIs will form a system of co-dependency, with different AIs relying on each other for inputs, guidance, maintenance, support, direction, amplification, resolution, upgrading, verification and trust. This ecosystem of AIs will be the environment, and just as in organic life, each AI will co-evolve with this environment, this society of minds.

Here are some notes on what we could expect for this kind of swarm intelligence.

• Maintaining a sustainable swarm intelligence is tricky. The science of complex adaptive systems indicates that there are sweet spots in the connectivity between swarm parts. Parts that are too heavily interconnected seize up in rigid paralysis; parts too thinly connected fly apart in chaos. Tweaking systems so that they don’t collapse but thrive and flourish is almost more art than science. A sudden collapse of a swarm intelligence will become a prime danger while using them.

• AI protocols will appear. More than APIs, these standards will enable unlike minds – dumb ones and super smart ones – to negotiate, hand off, trust, earn a reputation, and store memory between themselves. These all operate in the background; no ordinary human thinks of them.

• No single institution, corporation, or government will be able to control the swarm environment. When a networked mind makes a mistake, there probably won’t be a single author, owner, or operator to blame. While some institutions may control pressure points, or critical protocols, or bottleneck infrastructure, no institution will be responsible for what happens when people use AI. It will be similar to an internet for AI, which will have multiple stakeholders that keep it going. This diffuse liability is both a blessing and a curse.

• A distributed liability will likely birth new kinds of distributed and decentralized insurance and adjacent law. In addition, the need for ways to verify and trust trillions of agents, all claiming good intentions and competency, will require a whole new technological trust system that can verify, authenticate, evaluate, and rate unlimited alien agents and sub-minds. A significant cost of transactions between parts of the swarm intelligence will be dedicated to the trust network.

• We currently don’t have practical ways to assign accountability when harm emerges from interactions between AIs rather than from a single bad actor. We will need metrics to trace influence across networks, to estimate counterfactuals (“what would have happened without this component?”), in order to govern the swarm.

• A society of minds will produce parasites, scams, slop, spam, and adversarial hacker agents. Most of the agents in the swarm will be actual bots. We’ll grow some equivalent of an immune system with white blood cells to detect, isolate, and diminish the harm. Creating the immune system will be an economic opportunity for many.

• As a superorganism, AI will keep producing emergent phenomena and behaviors. It will generate varieties of thinking that are not present in any of the component AIs. This will be worrisome and exhilarating.

• Because of the planetary scale of this superorganism at its largest, much of its behavior and intelligence will feel alien. Some may call it inhuman, but it will certainly be unhuman.

• There will be multiple levels of swarm intelligence. One level will be planetary. Just like a body with tissue, there will also be sub-levels of swarms operating at the level of nations, and certainly corporations. In fact, as corporations become more and more cognified, permeated with AI, they will more and more resemble outright AI swarm intelligences. Another way of saying this is that more and more swarm intelligences will begin to do the work of, and act like, corporations.

• Rather than engineering, the best way of managing swarm AI may be more like gardening. We’ll use containment, many layers of fences, permissions, borders, and isolation in order to nurture the results we want. We will plant many species of minds, shape the environment, and cultivate the ones that behave well. Instead of controlling the system by understanding every internal mechanism with one clever algorithm, we’ll steer the way we govern markets, cities, or any system: indirectly, imperfectly, with observation and constant intervention.

So an average day 50 years from now in this swarm AI world, we will not be talking about AI. We will hardly see it. It will be everywhere, embedded into everything. We will have one or two personal agents we depend on and like; these exoselves might be like our twins or partners, but beyond them, we won’t be encountering AI. We’ll just encounter the world – cars, tools, kitchens, planes, offices, doors, screens – and that world has AI embedded into every bit of it. Behind our view, an ecosystem of AIs interact and are co-dependent on each other, animate the world with pervasive cognition, such that it is hard to determine where one mind starts and another ends. The environment is smarter. We will still carry our magic stones and wear smart glasses, but most of the intelligence will be embedded into the background. Getting this swarm intelligence to work will be the job of the next generation of inventors.