In 1998 a small group of us met weekly or more often to discuss the question of how self-organizing human collectivism and the recently emerged self-organizing global internet were co-evolving.
Symbiotic Intelligence: Self-Organizing Knowledge on Distributed Networks Driven by Human Interaction
Johnson, Joslyn, Rasmussen, Rocha, Smith, Kantor
22 years later, I find myself reflecting on this work, and the ensuing changes in the world, in the internet, and in my experiences and understanding of complex emergent phenomena and of collective intelligence. At the time of our writing, the *public* internet and the World Wide Web were only roughly 5 years old and ubiquitous network-connected mobile devices were not more than a laboratory concept. Now we are nearly 30 years into a global internet open to anyone with logistic and economic access and perhaps 10 or more with large portions of the third world leapfrogging/bootstrapping themselves into the first world with internet connected mobile devices.
The popular term remains "Collective Intelligence", but I am inclined to look at the implications of "Symbiosis".
Richard Dawkins' book "The Extended Phenotype" set a paradigm that human technology merely extends the human physiology with it's various mechanical and logical leverages. We invoke the idea that the technology we first developed *as* such an extension has now become a mutualistic symbiote, or more to the point a whole ecology of proto-organisms with various forms of symbiotic interdependencies with ourselves as individuals and as various collectives...
