buzz buzz buzz

Over at the future, Alex blogs about emergent collective intelligence in companies and in science fiction. As you might expect, the latter is rather more advanced than the former...or is it? If groups of people at a community, corporate or species level were to exhibit some form of emergent collective behavior that could be called "intelligent", would we even recognize it as such?

I think there's a frame of reference question here. Alex titles his entry "Hive Mind", perhaps as a nod to the canonical examples of emergent behaviors among bees, ants and other social insects. From a human point of view, the collective action of the hive appears intentional and perhaps even "intelligent", but from a single bee's perspective, it's probably not much more than buzz buzz buzz. By analogy, what is the frame of reference needed to perceive the collective action of human groups as purposeful and intelligent? Are we smart enough to bootstrap our understanding to the next level of abstraction? Or is it pretty much buzz buzz buzz for us too?

[One side note -- Alex says "Think of the consciousness that speaks to Case at the end of William Gibson's Neuromancer, or the voodoo deities that haunt the Net in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. (If you haven't read William Gibson's futuristic urban sprawl trilogy, get up, back slowly away from the computer, and run to your nearest library.)" I agree, but if you really want to experience Neuromancer, try to get your mitts on the audiobook edition. Unabridged, read by Gibson, it doesn't get any better than this. It's out of "print", but you can usually find a used copy on amazon or ebay. Highly recommended.]