Early November: mass layoffs beganTwitter blue-check parodiesThe company’s advertising business was in danger of being destroyed, so the new owner decided to be a bit dorm-roomy. Elon Musk was awakened at 1:33 a.m. on Thursday. Tweet:
Twitter is considered a collective, cybernetic, superintelligence due to its billions per day of bidirectional interactions.
Given the potential company-end chaos Musk was about to unleash on Twitter, this was quite a wild thought. However, it revealed something very important about Musk’s thinking process. Musk has been worried about the dangers of an all-powerful government for a long time. cybernetic superintelligencesHumanity might be at risk. You might conclude that Twitter would be on the list of reasons he wouldn’t spend $44 billion to purchase the company. He might not have realized that particular caveat until he was the one who had to pay. Perhaps he didn’t realize that Twitter was a high-priced service.
Musk was able to find a rich theoretical vein. Flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of cattle, swarms of bees, even tumors, brains, and sometimes drones and software agents — what we might collectively call “collectives” — do preternaturally intelligent things when they work in unison.
Musk was onto something. Biologists, information theorists, and anthropologists DoSocial networks, such as Musk’s bird-app, have at least some signs of becoming flocks. All the likes and favorites, the mutual follows, retweets, and shares on a social network transform us as individuals into something larger, smarter and more bizarre. And scientists hope that the mechanisms for how that works could someday help tame the crappier aspects of social media — the polarization, the disinformation, the harassment, the Nazis. Understanding Twitter as a group could help make social media less polarizing.
However, the truth is, I do not believe that Musk meant this. Musk has gotten every implication of the larger idea of Twitter as collective intelligence wrong since he came up with it. He doesn’t know what he bought or how it works at the core. It doesn’t matter if Musk holds it together or if it breaks into pieces, this deeper understanding should make us all more concerned about the future social media. Twitter might be sociopathic if it is a collective superrain.
Resistance is futile
Here’s a chilling thought: Elon Musk was right.
When a group of seemingly random-acting individuals follows a few simple rules, it can become a collective. For example, “turn right when your neighbor turns right” and “make an alarm when you hear an alarm.” These tiny instructions can lead to complex cooperative actions such as pack hunting and migrations. A weaver, for example, could create intricate patterns by simply repeating a few flicks on their loom. These are what scientists call emergent behaviors.
Animals must be able to exhibit the desired behaviors in order for them to emerge. Communicate. Fish and birds use visual signals about what their neighbors are doing — turn left, dive fast, whatever — to Make beautiful, flowing murmurationsof starlings, or quick en–masse undulations at anchovy schools. Hyenas use audible calls. Ants leave pheromone trails. People? We use language. That’s how we exchange information.
Yoshikazu Tsuno – AFP/Getty Images
In this sense, social networks can be described as Certain collectives. Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok are the best places for humans to communicate with each other. These are collectives and they produce viral memes and Arab Springs. “Collective behaviour occurs when there are rules of interaction among individuals. “You get emergent property,” Joe Bak-Coleman of Columbia University’s Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security says. He studies this stuff. “But this is quite different to the question of, on these very large scalas, are our processing information and making good decision?”
Musk’s tweet caught Bak-Coleman’s eye because he had been working for years to understand the collectivist nature social networks. Make them more effective. Yes, people communicate on social networks. Bak-Coleman points out that social media can alter the way information spreads. Our words spread faster than our words. We don’t get the signals of trustworthiness which our brains are programmed to look for. The bird nearest to you may be telling you to vote for Donald Trump if he says “turn right.” Because we are all more likely than others to share signals that are unexpected, new, or emotionally charged, disinformation, rage, and beauty move online faster than truth and beauty.
There’s a silver lining. Bak-Coleman, along with a few of his colleagues, pointed out in a paper last year called “The Upside to the Paper.”Stewardship for Global Collective BehaviorAll those ideas are so widespread and fast that a simple tweak could make a social networking site a lot more enjoyable. All that’s needed is to tap the brakes — to add a little bit more friction to the system, making it fractionally harder for any individual expression to go viral.
Signals begin to lose their effectiveness in high-functioning networks after three or four degrees separation. Social media lords or masters could have their systems set up so that if an idea threatens to infect Facebook or Twitter, circuit breakers shut down. It’s like ventilation and mask-wearing, but for memes. It might take some time for new ideas to spread. The germs will be eliminated.
Twitter users may want a better filtering process. DecampingMastodon is a social network that looks a lot like ships fleeing from a sinking rats. Mastodon has many servers, or “instances”, which each have their own rules of behavior and make wideband communication a bit more difficult than Twitter. All of this adds up into a “sort of”Antivirality“,” Clive Thompson, a tech writer put it. The network is slow and distant, which makes the experience more pleasant.
Musk doesn’t do any of this. Musk did indeed figure it out. What Twitter is. He didn’t understand how or why it works.
The rules aren’t always simple
We are now at a familiar sentence: Elon was wrong.
Collectives emerge only when they follow simple rules laid out by physics and biology — when the group itself decides on a course of action. However, social networks are built upon algorithms that govern the organization of information. Musk doesn’t seem able to grasp that Twitter can’t become a collective cybergenius without its owner.
Bak-Coleman explains that Elon’s tweet is basically advocating the invisible arm of social behavior. “We just connect everybody and the invisible arm of collective intelligence, which will usher in a utopia that allows free speech and is free from violence,” Bak-Coleman says. This would be a good idea for Joe Rogan’s podcast, but it is no different from the claim that the economy will work itself out.
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Social networks have rules and regulations, just as an economy. Twitter’s current rules, along with most other social networks, are intended to increase conflict. The thermostat is set high and the chairs are cramped. Why? All those algorithmic choices keep you clicking. Bak-Coleman explains that they drive engagement and mine our attention to feed ads to us, which we engage and buy stuff. That generates revenue for this site.
If all members of a group are infighting and unable to come to a consensus, it is impossible for them collectively to develop cognition. Iain Couzin, an expert on collective behavior and director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, says that a brain that is infighting and incapable of reaching a consensus would fail to function. The analogy is faulty because Twitter does not have natural selection. Facebook, Twitter — all the human social networks do not have that property.”
This construction creates a social network It might have been a collective superintelligence, had capitalists left it to its — our? — own devices. The algorithms and advertisements that make it lucrative exclude the possibility for emergent collective cognition. They take out the superintelligence when it was still young and create a dumb machine to make money from our attention.
Common sense
Most likely, the truth lies somewhere between. Musk may have been right about some things, but he was wrong about the details. An emerging uberbrain might be a social network built on algorithmic rails. Alsobe horrible, a cybernetic supraintelligence that will be Extremely hardcoreTo pursue profit.
It remains to be believed that Twitter’s superintelligence is similar to Musk’s.
Social networks can come in two types according to science of collectivity: they can be kind and gentle or profitable. You can think of all the different ways social media works: video clips, blog entries with long text, photos, anonymity, moderated, unmoderated and anonymous. All of the for-profit ones have been a mess. However, even the best experts in this field will admit that they don’t know the reason or how to fix it.
Duncan Watts, a computational socio scientist at Penn who also worked at Yahoo and Microsoft, says that “we have no idea” what creates collective intelligence among people, particularly at large scales. Finding some science to tame social networks would be great, of course — “a super important question, both for science and society,” Watts says. “But it’s so different from what most social science has actually established, that I don’t think we know any useful information.”
It is difficult to study collectives, ya’all. If the networks are owned by public companies and have 100,000,000 users, is it really hard to study them? It’s all over. Bak-Coleman acknowledges, “We have no clue.” “Well, not zero clue. However, if Elon Musk decides that the current recommendation system in bad and replaces it with a new one, shared the code with scientists and allowed us to use it for a year and half, we couldn’t tell what it would do to democracy.
Couzin is a similar opinion. Couzin says that it would be beneficial if these algorithms were more transparent. “There is an interesting ethical aspect to this control, the subtle dials that they have to control information structure.”
What did Musk do when he took control of Twitter? He The team was firedThis company studies these things and shares data with other researchers. The nature of Twitter’s superintelligence like Musk’s remains a matter for faith.
Alas, we are all in it together.
Perhaps ironically, the single most intriguing piece of evidence supporting the notion that Twitter is a positive, elevated, emergent superintelligence, comes from its final act: that so many people have left it.
One of the most fundamental things that a collective does is MoveIt doesn’t matter if bacteria attacks a new organ, or elephants walk to water. Couzin said that Twitter’s collective migration to Mastodon is what makes it seem like everyone on Twitter is trudging across the digital landscape toward Mastodon.
It’s not about any animal network. We are all acting as if HoneybeesLooking for a new nest. When a hive breaks down, a honeybee swarm sends out scouts with the specs for a perfect nest encoded in their brains — things like size of entrance, location, square footage, and so on. Scouts are the real estate agents for honeybees. They search for suitable candidates and fly back to the bee clusters to present their case. By dancing.
Every scout’s choreography identifies the direction and the distance from the site it is promoting. The site’s quality is more important than its length, so the scout dances longer and harder, attracting non-scouts to the moves. The scene eventually turns into a whole-hive dance-off — “Step Up: The Swarm” — until only one team is left. All the bees join together to create a huge apiary Bollywood number. This also teaches everyone how to find the new nest’s coordinates. They then all fly off.
So, to bee or not bee? Twitter entered the dance-off phase under Musk. While I may spend too much time on Twitter, my experience the past two weeks has been similar to a bee watching as the scouts return. Some people move towards Mastodon, while others go for Cohost. I even learned new dance moves. I will be disappointed if the Twitter superintelligence sings a Kubrickian version of “Daisy” then collapses into a pile full of melting isolinearchips. However, I am looking forward to joining a new collective wherever we locate our next hive mind.
Of course, the analogy is not perfect. Scientists are quick to point this out: you cannot compare people with insects. Couzin claims that humans are smarter than bees.
Uh-huh. We are.
Adam Rogers Insider’s senior correspondent.
