Transformation of Collective Intelligences

Perspective of Transhumanism

Jean-Max Noyer

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781848219106
• eBook ISBN: 9781119370925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Information Technology
• Index: Computer Science

There is a great transformation of the production of knowledge and intelligibility. The "digital fold of the world" (with the convergence of NBIC) affects the collective assemblages of "thought", of research. The aims of these assemblages are also controversial issues. From a general standpoint, these debates concern "performative science and performative society". But one emerges and strengthens that has several names: transhumanism, post-humanism, speculative post-humanism. It appears as a great narration, a large story about the future of our existence, facing our entry into the Anthropocene. It is also presented as a concrete utopia with an anthropological and technical change. In this book, we proposed to show how collective intelligences stand in the middle of the coupling of ontological horizons and of the "process of bio-technical maturation".

1
Elements of the General Configuration and Adaptive Landscape of Collective Intelligences

The conditions in which intelligence is applied evolve. All encompassing narratives and anthropological accounts are on the rise, and their discourse envisions a very specific future. Sometimes, they relatively boldly predict that humanity will soon overcome the limits of physiology, medical practice, intelligence or creativity. Sometimes, they find allies in key sectors of scientific or technological research as well as in large sections of the most powerful politico-economical agencies and legitimize the implementation of actual apparatuses that aim to redefine the essence of knowledge and existence to set up new ways of collectively inhabiting the world. This chapter explains why we try to relate these transformations and why we stress the lines of tension they bring about.

1.1. The intertwined narratives of tangible utopias and brilliant futures

Relating these transformations is indeed nowadays unavoidably necessary because of the very transformations globally affecting the ecologies that constitute our associated milieus and of which we are both the expression and the expressed. This renewed effort to address the issue of the collective intelligences is produced in specific conditions that are worth reminding, if not exhaustively, at least through some of its moments and main characteristics. We will stick to recent history, because we see the decades between the two world wars and the few years that immediately followed WW2 as specifically rich periods of transformations of modes of production and circulation of knowledge, as well as moments of change in the means of semiotic management of societies, organizations and companies.

This period was followed, at the end of the 1950s, by the first massive effects of the process of digitization of the sign, itself the forerunner of what was about to happen, a phenomenon we could call the great disruption. The disruption was caused by this very potent new system of digital, networked writing, whose virtual productions and constant updates increasingly influence and encompass our lives and experiences.

During the 1920s and 1930s, several innovative research projects were carried out, especially in the documentation domain. They epitomized the growing awareness that fundamental issues were becoming prominent concerning document and information management, in societies whose modes of organizing was becoming increasingly complex. These works remind us of the necessity to reflect on the environments of intelligence and on the environments of memory under the constraining weight of complexity and on the constant challenge of always renewed forms of collectives that become increasingly heterogeneous. Vannevar Bush, on his part, developed an interest for the new apparatuses of intelligent access to documents (Memex¹), showing in his research that accessing issues were somewhat overridden by cognitive navigation practice. Of course, accessing documents involves collecting and classifying them, but only in order to better sort, navigate and associate them. In a nutshell, in order to better exploit and create in an ever-growing indeterminate mass of knowledge and documents whose differentiation keeps increasing.

Many research works were published across the world anound this time, that all pushed in the same direction. The Second World War and the fast rise of the American War Machine, with in particular the Manhattan Project Vannevar Bush was in charge of, strikingly exposed the collective dimensions of (applied and fundamental) research as well as the coexistence of heterogeneous processes and evermore sophisticated mediations. This increase in complexity in turn proved to be urgently in need of collective organization and new intellectual technologies in order to augment the cognitive abilities of the human mind. Vannevar Bush himself expressed this call [BUS 45] in his famous 1945 paper “As we may think”², an essay in which he brings to light a number of transformations that affect the modes of production of knowledge. The effects and the posterity of this essay are well known.

To keep a long story short, during the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, Carl Robnett Licklider³ [LIC 58], initially working as a psychoacoustics specialist, promptly imagined the possibility of connecting several computers together with user-friendly interfaces. Licklider therefore played a significant role in the design, financing and management of the research that led to the elaboration of personal computers and the Internet. In Man-Computer Symbiosis, he wrote: “Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers. It will involve very close coupling between the human and the electronic members of the partnership. The main aims are (1) to let computers facilitate formulative thinking as they now facilitate the solution of formulated problems, and (2) to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs. In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone can perform. Prerequisites for the achievement of the effective, cooperative association include developments in computer time sharing, memory components, memory organization, programming languages, and in input and output equipment”⁴. Douglas Engelbart⁵ also inscribed his work in the perspective of collective and augmented intelligence. His invention of the mouse and more generally his work on the computer were nested in the reflection on the collective dimensions of intellectual activities, within the framework of the emerging systems of digital hypertext.

Nelson⁶ [NEL 65] invented digital hypertext (20th National Conference of the Association of Computer Machinery). He developed, with the Xanadu project, a system that aimed at enabling each individual to store information and make it accessible to all. “The aim of Xanadu was to build a universal system for hypertext publishing: in other words, a virtual library that could host infinite numbers of documents, in which we could wander freely via hypertext links. The authors would be automatically remunerated by a ‘royalty micropayment mechanism’”⁷.

We thus see that the whole process of work began to transform as soon as the Second World War was over, as well as all the modes of production of knowledge, all the organizing types and methods. Far be it from us to immodestly attempt to draw in this book a general history of the concept and notion of collective intelligence. We furthermore would not attempt such a history because we inscribe our reflection in the line of those who think that intelligence “is always-already collective and machined” and that its history is always fundamentally bound to the history of the environments and to the ecologies of the brain-body-(writing-mediation)-world couplings. To keep a long story short, let us only state that we inscribe our work in the continuation of that of Leroi-Gourhan [LER 64], whose research and reflection have been, in recent years, furthered in the powerful works of Stiegler [STI 94] as well as in the ideas expressed by Goody [GOO 77], Lévy [LEV 93], Herrendschmidt [HER 07] and Latour [LAT 84].

Further back in time, Condorcet during the 18th Century and Durkheim in the 19th Century had already developed ideas about the concept of collective intelligence. Fleck [FLE 05], on his part, insisted during the first half of the 20th Century on the essentially collective characteristic of scientific research and proposed, in order to elaborate on this concept, notions such as thought collectives (or thought styles). More recently, Levy in his 1994 book entitled “L’Intelligence collective” (“The collective Intelligence”) remarked that in the new digital conditions of networked hypertext memories, “collective intelligence (appears as) the project of a varied intelligence, distributed all over, always building synergies and being valued in real time”.

1.2. Intelligence is “always already collective and machined”

There is a long history of collective assemblages of intelligence. In only a few millenniums, humanity fostered the vast Nile water resource management system, the cities of ancient Greece, Rome and its empire, collective intelligences of the Arab world, the large network of copyist monks, the rise of merchant capitalism and the invention of the printing press, etc. This long tradition of collective intelligences is constitutive of our history.

Assemblages were complex from the very first times. In Sumer, for example, they combined the invention of writing systems, currencies and the State, all these intertwined with a growing urbanization that, although initially relatively slow, was irresistible.

Nowadays, the milieus of intelligence are heterogeneous and the types of writings that constitute them are legions. The couplings “cortex-mediation-world” are intricately woven together. The alliances that unite texts, images and sounds were initially only slowly varying, but have very recently begun to change rapidly. Semiotics and the diverse non-exclusively linguistic writings have very early played a major part and, today more than ever, the empire of artifacts relentlessly brings new differentiations and intensifications of analogical interplays.

Later in this book we will detail how, nowadays, the complication of the world alters the conditions of exercise of intelligence, the conditions of creativity and the cognitive becomings that affect the imitative and analogical regimes, the regimes of “meme”⁸ propagation and translation and, once more, the regimes of memory.

As Stiegler writes in his comments about the current vertiginous deepening of non-exclusively linguistic writings, “digital printing allows to 3D print objects that renew, in depth, the question of the artifact, a question that has been constitutive of the epiphylogenic tertiary retention since the beginning of hominization. As a printed object, the most mundane epiphylogenic tertiary retention becomes altogether hypermnesic, transitional and industrial, all the more because RFID chips as well as other tags embedded in objects. The so-called “communicating” objects, endowed with Internet modules (whose generalization the IPV6 protocol would enable) are constitutive of the Internet of Things (IoT) in a hyperreticulation stage in which not only its inhabitants but the whole world itself is double. It becomes the subject of an interpretation grammar throughout, as realized by, for example, by smart cities. For one thing, the digital tertiary retention has forever upset the functional and oppositional divide between production and consumption. But more importantly, the offset of the function of materialization of industrial design toward the tridimensional printers as robotic terminals seems to complete the industrial metamorphosis: it irreversibly condemns the centralist reticulation that spread through the United States and then Europe via the networks of roads, motorways and audiovisual Hertzian broadcasting”.

In this perspective, we seem to be advancing toward complex “cognitive onto-ethologies”, according to the scales considered. This movement involves the possibility of combinatorics and appropriate semiotic grammars that should enable wider navigations than in the past. This point will be developed further in what follows. One finds so many phrases that invoke this trend that their repetition sometimes induces a sense of running gag: Smart Cities, Smart Agriculture, Smart Grids, Smart Factories, Smart Buildings, Smart Interfaces, Smart Algorithms, Smart Medicine, etc. The “associated milieu”⁹ to which our cerebralities are bound keeps extending itself. What is called the IoT is central to this extension. From the IoT to the hybrid becomings of the Living, a hypernetwork of n dimensions is being deployed, a kind of network shaped by the multiplicity of connections and interfaces that come with or between artifacts, actants (be they organic, non-organic, algorithmic) and writings. A network that relies on operating concepts (linked data, metadata, ontologies, folksonomies)¹⁰, a network that connects billions of human beings as well as billions of things and documents in “clusters” of infinitely varying sizes that can legitimately and concretely be connected in a plastic and open way. This is an emerging anthropological stratum embroidered of an additional synaptic world that seeps in everywhere, weaving into the texture of the world, weaving against it, tightly adhering to the global fabric. This ever-expanding weaving of links and data are therefore complicated by the interweaving of being and things and beings and objects.

These new textures, as we briefly mentioned, are deeply involved in the continuous urb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Introduction
• 1 Elements of the General Configuration and Adaptive Landscape of Collective Intelligences
• 2 Post- and Transhumanist Horizons
• 3 Fragmented Encyclopedism
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement