Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism

http://kk.org/thetechnium/evidence-of-a-g/

I am not the first, nor the only one, to believe a superorganism is

emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes
wrapping the surface of our planet. No one can dispute the scale or
reality of this vast connectivity. Whats uncertain is, what is it? Is this
global web of computers, servers and trunk lines a mere mechanical
circuit, a very large tool, or does it reach a threshold where
something, well, different happens?
So far the proposition that a global superorganism is forming along
the internet power lines has been treated as a lyrical metaphor at
best, and as a mystical illusion at worst. Ive decided to treat the idea
of a global superorganism seriously, and to see if I could muster a
falsifiable claim and evidence for its emergence.
My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational
devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a
superorganism of computation with its own emergent behaviors.
Superorganisms are a different type of organism. Large things are
made from smaller things. Big machines are made from small parts,
and visible living organisms from invisible cells. But these parts dont
usually stand on their own. In a slightly fractal recursion, the parts of
a superorganism lead fairly autonomous existences on their own. A
superorganism such as an insect or mole rat colony contains many
sub-individuals. These individual organisms eat, move about, get
things done on their own. From most perspectives they appear
complete. But in the case of the social insects and the naked mole rat
these autonomous sub individuals need the super colony to reproduce
themselves. In this way reproduction is a phenomenon that occurs at
the level of the superorganism.

define

the One

Machine as

the

emerging

superorganism

of

computers. It is a megasupercomputer composed of billions of sub

computers. The sub computers can compute individually on their
own, and from most perspectives these units are distinct complete
pieces of gear. But there is an emerging smartness in their collective
that is smarter than any individual computer. We could say learning
(or smartness) occurs at the level of the superorganism.
Supercomputers built from subcomputers were invented 50 years
ago. Back then clusters of tightly integrated specialized computer
chips in close proximity were designed to work on one kind of task,
such as simulations. This was known as cluster computing. In recent
years, weve created supercomputers composed of loosely integrated
individual

computers

not

centralized

in

one

building,

but

geographically distributed over continents and designed to be

versatile and general purpose. This later supercomputer is called grid
computing because the computation is served up as a utility to be
delivered anywhere on the grid, like electricity. It is also called cloud
computing because the tally of the exact component machines is
dynamic and amorphous like a cloud. The actual contours of the
grid or cloud can change by the minute as machines come on or off
line.
There are many cloud computers at this time. Amazon is credited
with building one of the first commercial cloud computers. Google
probably has the largest cloud computer in operation. According to
Jeff Dean one of their infrastructure engineers, Google is hoping to
scale up their cloud computer to encompass 10 million processors in
1,000 locations.
Each of these processors is an off-the-shelf PC chip that is nearly
identical to the ones that power your laptop. A few years ago
computer scientists realized that it did not pay to make specialized
chips for a supercomputer. It was far more cost effective to just gang
up rows and rows of cheap generic personal computer chips, and
route around them when they fail. The data centers for cloud
computers are now filled with racks and racks of the most massproduced chips on the planet. An unexpected bonus of this strategy is

that their high production volume means bugs are minimized and so
the generic chips are more reliable than any custom chip they could
have designed.
If the cloud is a vast array of personal computer processors, then why
not add your own laptop or desktop computer to it? It in a certain
way it already is. Whenever you are online, whenever you click on a
link, or create a link, your processor is participating in the yet larger
cloud, the cloud of all computer chips online. I call this cloud the One
Machine because in many ways it acts as one supermegacomputer.

The majority of the content of the web is created within this one
virtual computer. Links are programmed, clicks are chosen, files are
moved and code is installed from the dispersed, extended cloud
created by consumers and enterprise the tons of smart phones,
Macbooks, Blackberries, and workstations we work in front of. While
the business of moving bits and storing their history all happens deep
in the tombs of server farms, the clouds interaction with the real
world takes place in the extremely distributed field of laptop, handheld and desktop devices. Unlike servers these outer devices have
output screens, and eyes, skin, ears in the form of cameras, touch
pads, and microphones. We might say the cloud is embodied
primarily by these computer chips in parts only loosely joined to grid.

This megasupercomputer is the Cloud of all clouds, the largest

possible inclusion of communicating chips. It is a vast machine of
extraordinary dimensions. It is comprised of quadrillion chips, and
consumes 5% of the planets electricity. It is not owned by any one
corporation or nation (yet), nor is it really governed by humans at all.
Several corporations run the larger sub clouds, and one of them,
Google, dominates the user interface to the One Machine at the
moment.
None of this is controversial. Seen from an abstract level there surely
must be a very large collective virtual machine. But that is not what
most

people

think

of

when

they

hear

the

term

global

superorganism. That phrase suggests the sustained integrity of a

living organism, or a defensible and defended boundary, or maybe a
sense of self, or even conscious intelligence.
Sadly, there is no ironclad definition for some of the terms we most
care about, such as life, mind, intelligence and consciousness. Each of
these terms has a long list of traits often but not always associated
with them. Whenever these traits are cast into a qualifying definition,
we

can

easily

find

troublesome

exceptions.

For

instance,

if

reproduction is needed for the definition of life, what about mules,

which are sterile?

Mules are obviously alive. Intelligence is a

notoriously slippery threshold, and consciousness more so. The

logical answer is that all these phenomenon are continuums. Some
things are smarter, more alive, or less conscious than others. The
thresholds for life, intelligence, and consciousness are gradients,
rather than off-on binary.
With that perspective a useful way to tackle the question of whether a
planetary superorganism is emerging is to offer a gradient of four
assertions.
There exists on this planet:

A manufactured superorganism

II An autonomous superorganism
III An autonomous smart superorganism

IV An autonomous conscious superorganism

These four could be thought of as an escalating set of definitions. At

the bottom we start with the almost trivial observation that we have
constructed a globally distributed cluster of machines that can exhibit
large-scale behavior. Call this the weak form of the claim. Next come
the two intermediate levels, which are uncertain and vexing (and
therefore probably the most productive to explore). Then we end up
at the top with the extreme assertion of Oh my God, its thinking!
Thats the strong form of the superorganism. Very few people would
deny the weak claim and very few affirm the strong.
My claim is that in addition to these four strengths of definitions, the
four levels are developmental stages through which the One Machine
progresses. It starts out forming a plain superorganism, than
becomes autonomous, then smart, then conscious. The phases are
soft, feathered, and blurred. My hunch is that the One Machine has
advanced through levels I and II in the past decades and is presently
entering level III. If that is true we should find initial evidence of an
autonomous smart (but not conscious) computational superorganism
operating today.
But lets start at the beginning.
LEVEL

A manufactured superorganism
By definition, organisms and superorganisms have boundaries. An
outside and inside. The boundary of the One Machine is clear: if a
device is on the internet, it is inside. On means it is communicating
with the other inside parts. Even though some components are on
in terms of consuming power, they may be on (communicating) for
only brief periods. Your laptop may be useful to you on a 5-hour
plane ride, but it may be technically on the One Machine only when
you land and it finds a wifi connection. An unconnected TV is not part
of the superorganism; a connected TV is.

Most of the time the

embedded chip in your car is off the grid, but on the few occasions
when its contents are downloaded for diagnostic purposes, it becomes

part of the greater cloud. The dimensions of this network are

measurable and finite, although variable.
The

One

Machine

consumes

electricity

to

produce

structured

information. Like other organisms, it is growing. Its size is increasing

rapidly, close to 66% per year, which is basically the rate of Moores
Law. Every year it consumes more power, more material, more
money, more information, and more of our attention. And each year it
produces more structured information, more wealth, and more
interest.
On average the cells of biological organisms have a resting
metabolism rate of between 1- 10 watts per kilogram. Based
on research by Jonathan Koomey a UC Berkeley, the most efficient
common data servers in 2005 (by IBM and Sun) have a metabolism
rate of 11 watts per kilogram. Currently the other parts of the
Machine (the electric grid itself, the telephone system) may not be as
efficient, but I havent found any data on it yet. Energy efficiency is a
huge issue for engineers. As the size of the One Machine scales up
the metabolism rate for the whole will probably drop (although the
total amount of energy consumed rises).
The span of the Machine is roughly the size of the surface of the
earth. Some portion of it floats a few hundred miles above in orbit,
but at the scale of the planet, satellites, cell towers and servers farms
form the same thin layer. Activity in one part can be sensed across
the entire organism; it forms a unified whole.
Within a hive honeybees are incapable of thermoregulation. The hive
superorganism must regulate the bees working temperature. It does
this by collectively fanning thousands of tiny bee wings, which moves
hot air out of the colony. Individual computers are incapable of
governing the flow of bits between themselves in the One Machine.
Prediction: the One Machine will continue to grow. We should see how
data flows around this whole machine in response to daily usage
patterns (see Follow the Moon). The metabolism rate of the whole
should approach that of a living organism.

LEVEL

II

An autonomous superorganism
Autonomy is a problematic concept. There are many who believe that
no non-living entity can truly be said to be autonomous. We have
plenty

of

examples

of

partial

autonomy

in

created

things.

Autonomous airplane drones: they steer themselves, but they dont

repair themselves. We have self-repairing networks that dont
reproduce themselves. We have self-reproducing computer viruses,
but they dont have a metabolism. All these inventions require human
help for at least aspect of their survival. To date we have not conjured
up a fully human-free sustainable synthetic artifact of any type.
But autonomy too is a continuum. Partial autonomy is often all we
need or want. Well be happy with miniature autonomous cleaning
bots that requires our help, and approval, to reproduce. A global
superorganism doesnt need to be fully human-free for us to sense its
autonomy. We would acknowledge a degree of autonomy if an entity
displayed

any

of

these

traits:

self-repair,

self-defense,

self-

maintenance (securing energy, disposing waste), self-control of goals,

self-improvement. The common element in all these characteristics is
of course the emergence of a self at the level of the superorganism.
In the case of the One Machine we should look for evidence of selfgovernance at the level of the greater cloud rather than at the
component chip level. A very common cloud-level phenomenon is a
DDoS attack. In a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack a vast
hidden network of computers under the control of a master computer
are awakened from their ordinary tasks and secretly assigned to
ping (call) a particular target computer in mass in order to
overwhelm it and take it offline. Some of these networks (called bot
nets) may reach a million unsuspecting computers, so the effect of
this distributed attack is quite substantial. From the individual level it
is hard to detect the net, to pin down its command, and to stop it.
DDoS attacks are so massive that they can disrupt traffic flows
outside of the targeted routers a consequence we might expect
from an superorganism level event.

I dont think we can make too much of it yet, but researchers such
as Reginald Smith have noticed there was a profound change in the
nature of traffic on the communications network in the last few
decades as it shifted from chiefly voice to a mixture of data, voice,
and everything else. Voice traffic during the Bell/AT&T era obeyed a
pattern known as Poisson distribution, sort of like a Gaussian bell
curve. But ever since data from diverse components and web pages
became the majority of bits on the lines, the traffic on the internet
has been following a scale-invariant, or fractal, or power-law pattern.
Here the distribution of very large and very small packets fall out
onto a curve familiarly recognized as the long-tail curve. The scaleinvariant, or long tail traffic patterns of the recent internet has meant
engineers needed to devise a whole set of new algorithms for shaping
the teletraffic. This phase change toward scale-invariant traffic
patterns may be evidence for an elevated degree of autonomy. Other
researchers have detected sensitivity to initial conditions, strange
attractor patterns and stable periodic orbits in the self-similar nature
of traffic all indications of self-governing systems. Scale-free
distributions can be understood as a result of internal feedback,
usually brought about by loose interdependence between the units.
Feedback loops constrain the actions of the bits by other bits. For
instance the Ethernet collision detection management algorithm
(CSMA/CD) employs feedback loops to manage congestion by backing
off collisions in response to other traffic.

The foundational TCP/IP

system underpinning internet traffic therefore behaves in part as a

massive closed loop feedback system. While the scale free pattern of
internet traffic is indisputable and verified by many studies, there is
dispute whether it means the system itself is tending to optimize
traffic efficiency but some believe it is.
Unsurprisingly the vast flows of bits in the global internet exhibit
periodic rhythms. Most of these are diurnal, and resemble a
heartbeat. But perturbations of internet bit flows caused by massive
traffic congestion can also be seen. Analysis of these abnormal
events show great similarity to abnormal heart beats. They deviate
from an at rest rhythms the same way that fluctuations of a
diseased heart deviated from a healthy heart beat.

Prediction: The One Machine has a low order of autonomy at present.

If the superorganism hypothesis is correct in the next decade we
should detect increased scale-invariant phenomenon, more cases of
stabilizing

feedback

loops,

and

more

autonomous

traffic

management system.
LEVEL

III

An autonomous smart superorganism

Organisms can be smart without being conscious. A rat is smart, but
we presume, without much self-awareness. If the One Machine was
as unconsciously smart as a rat, we would expect it to follow the
strategies a clever animal would pursue. It would seek sources of
energy, it would gather as many other resources it could find, maybe
even hoard them. It would look for safe, secure shelter. It would steal
anything it needed to grow. It would fend off attempts to kill it. It
would resist parasites, but not bother to eliminate them if they
caused no mortal harm. It would learn and get smarter over time.
Google and Amazon, two clouds of distributed computers, are getting
smarter. Google has learned to spell. By watching the patterns of
correct-spelling humans online it has become a good enough speller
that it now corrects bad-spelling humans. Google is learning dozens
of languages, and is constantly getting better at translating from one
language to another. It is learning how to perceive the objects in a
photo. And of course it is constantly getting better at answering
everyday questions. In much the same manner Amazon has learned
to use the collective behavior of humans to anticipate their reading
and buying habits. It is far smarter than a rat in this department.
Cloud computers such as Google and Amazon form the learning
center for the smart superorganism. Lets call this organ el Googazon,
or el Goog for short. El Goog encompasses more than the functions
the company Google and includes all the functions provided by Yahoo,
Amazon, Microsoft online and other cloud-based services. This loosely
defined cloud behaves like an animal.

El Goog seeks sources of energy. It is building power plants around

the world at strategic points of cheap energy. It is using its own
smart web to find yet cheaper energy places and to plan future power
plants. El Goog is sucking in the smartest humans on earth to work
for it, to help make it smarter. The smarter it gets, the more smart
people, and smarter people, want to work for it. El Goog ropes in
money. Money is its higher metabolism. It takes the money of
investors to create technology which attracts human attention (ads),
which in turns creates more money (profits), which attracts more
investments. The smarter it makes itself, the more attention and
money will flow to it.
Manufactured intelligence is a new commodity in the world. Until now
all useable intelligence came in the package of humans and all their
troubles. El Goog and the One Machine offer intelligence without
human troubles. In the beginning this intelligence is transhuman
rather than non-human intelligence. It is the smartness derived from
the wisdom of human crowds, but as it continues to develop this
smartness transcends a human type of thinking. Humans will eagerly
pay for El Goog intelligence. It is a different kind of intelligence. It is
not artificial i.e. a mechanical

because it is extracted from

billions of humans working within the One Machine. It is a hybrid

intelligence, half humanity, half computer chip.

Therefore it is

probably more useful to us. We dont know what the limits are to its
value. How much would you pay for a portable genius who knew all
there was known?
With the snowballing wealth from this fiercely desirable intelligence,
el Goog builds a robust network that cannot be unplugged. It uses its
distributed intelligence to devise more efficient energy technologies,
more wealth producing inventions, and more favorable human laws
for its continued prosperity. El Goog is developing an immune system
to restrict the damage from viruses, worms and bot storms to the
edges of its perimeter. These parasites plague humans but they wont
affect el Googs core functions. While El Goog is constantly seeking
chips to occupy, energy to burn, wires to fill, radio waves to ride,
what it wants and needs most is money. So one test of its success is

when El Goog becomes our bank. Not only will all data flow through
it, but all money as well.

This New York Times chart of the October 2008 financial market crash
shows how global markets were synchronized, as if they were one
organism responding to a signal.
How far away is this? Closer than you think say the actual CEOs of
Google, the company. I like the way George Dyson puts it:
If you build a machine that makes connections between everything,
accumulates all the data in the world, and you then harness all
available minds to collectively teach it where the meaningful
connections and meaningful data are (Who is searching Whom?)
while implementing deceptively simple algorithms that reinforce
meaningful connections while physically moving, optimizing and
replicating the data structures accordingly if you do all this you will,
from highly economical (yes, profitable) position arrive at a result
an intelligence that is not as far off as people think.
To accomplish all this el Goog need not be conscious, just smart.
Prediction: The mega-cloud will learn more languages, answer more
of our questions, anticipate more of our actions, process more of our
money, create more wealth, and become harder to turn off.
LEVEL

IV

An autonomous conscious superorganism

How would we know if there was an autonomous conscious
superorganism? We would need a Turing Test for a global AI. But the
Turing Test is flawed for this search because it is meant to detect
human-like intelligence, and if a consciousness emerged at the scale

of a global megacomputer, its intelligence would unlikely to be

anything human-like. We might need to turn to SETI, the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), for guidance. By definition, it is a
test for non-human intelligence. We would have to turn the search
from the stars to our own planet, from an ETI, to an ii an internet
intelligence. I call this proposed systematic program Sii, the Search
for Internet Intelligence.
This search assumes the intelligence we are looking for is not humanlike. It may operate at frequencies alien to our minds. Remember the
tree-ish Ents in Lord of the Rings? It took them hours just to say
hello. Or the gas cloud intelligence in Fred Hoyles The Black Cloud.
A global conscious superorganism might have thoughts at such a
high level, or low frequency, that we might be unable to detect it. Sii
would require a very broad sensitivity to intelligence.
But as Allen Tough, an ETI theorist told me, Unfortunately, radio and
optical

SETI

astronomers

pay

remarkably

little

attention

to

intelligence. Their attention is focused on the search for anomalous

radio waves and rapidly pulsed laser signals from outer space. They
do not think much about the intelligence that would produce those
signals. The cloud computer a global superorganism swims in is
nothing but unnatural waves and non-random signals, so the current
set of SETI tools and techniques wont help in a Sii.
For instance, in 2002 researchers analyzed some 300 million packets
on the internet to classify their origins. They were particularly
interested in the very small percentage of packets that passed
through malformed. Packets (the messages envelope) are malformed
by either malicious hackers to crash computers or by various bugs in
the system. Turns out some 5% of all malformed packets examined
by the study had unknown origins neither malicious origins nor
bugs. The researchers shrug these off. The unreadable packets are
simply labeled unknown. Maybe they were hatched by hackers with
goals unknown to the researches, or by bugs not found. But a
malformed packet could also be an emergent signal. A self-created
packet. Almost by definition, these will not be tracked, or monitored,
and when seen shrugged off as unknown.

There are scads of science fiction scenarios for the first contact
(awareness) of an emerging planetary AI. Allen Tough suggested two
others:
One strategy is to assume that Internet Intelligence might have its
own web page in which it explains how it came into being, what it is
doing now, and its plans and hopes for the future. Another strategy is
to post an invitation to ii (just as we have posted an invitation to
ETI). Invite it to reveal itself, to dialogue, to join with us in mutually
beneficial projects. It is possible, of course, that Internet Intelligence
has made a firm decision not to reveal itself, but it is also possible
that it is undecided and our invitation will tip the balance.
The main problem with these tests for a conscious ii superorganism
is that they dont seem like the place to begin. I doubt the first debut
act of consciousness is to post its biography, or to respond to an
evite. The course of our own awakening consciousness when we were
children is probably more fruitful. A standard test for self-awareness
in a baby or adult primate is to reflect its image back in a mirror.
When it can recognize its mirrored behavior as its own it has a
developed sense of self. What would the equivalent mirror be for an
ii?
But even before passing a mirror test, an intelligent consciousness
would acquire a representation of itself, or more accurately a
representation of a self. So one indication of a conscious ii would be
the detection of a map of itself. Not a centrally located visible chart,
but an articulation of its being. A picture of itself. What was inside
and what was outside. It would have to be a real time atlas, probably
distributed, of what it was. Part inventory, part operating manual,
part self-portrait, it would act like an internal mirror. It would pay
attention to this map. One test would be to disturb the internal selfportrait to see if the rest of the organism was disturbed. It is
important to note that there need be no self-awareness of this self
map. It would be like asking a baby to describe itself.
Long before a conscious global AI tries to hide itself, or take over the
world, or begin to manipulate the stock market, or blackmail hackers

to

eliminate

any

competing

iis

(see

the

science

fiction

novel Daemon), it will be a fragile baby of a superorganism. Its

intelligence and consciousness will only be a glimmer, even if we
know how to measure and detect it. Imagine if we were Martians and
didnt know whether human babies were conscious or not. How old
would they be before we were utterly convinced they were conscious
beings? Probably long after they were.
Prediction: The cloud will develop an active and controlling map of
itself (which includes a recursive map in the map), and a governing
sense of otherness.
Whats so important about superorganism?
We dont have very scientific tests for general intelligence in animals
or humans. We have some tests for a few very narrow tasks, but we
have no reliable measurements for grades or varieties of intelligence
beyond the range of normal IQ tests. What difference does it make
whether we measure a global organism? Why bother?
Measuring the degree of self-organization of the One Machine is
important for these reasons:

1) The more we are aware of how the big cloud of this Machine
behaves, the more useful it will be to us. If it adapts like an
organism, then it is essential to know this. If it can self-repair,
that is vital knowledge. If it is smart, figuring the precise way it
is smart will help us to be smarter.
2) In general, a more self-organized machine is more useful.
We can engineer aspects of the machine to be more ready to
self-organize. We can favor improvements that enable selforganization. We can assist its development by being aware of
its growth and opening up possibilities in its development.
3) There are many ways to be smart and powerful. We have no
clue to the range of possibilities a superorganism this big, made
out of a billion small chips, might take, but we know the
number of possible forms is more than one. By being aware
early in the process we can shape the kind of self-organization
and intelligence a global superorganism could have.

As I said, I am not the first nor only person to consider all this. In
2007

Philip

Tetlow

published

an

entire

book, The

Webs

Awake, exploring this concept. He lays out many analogs between

living systems and the web, but of course they are only parallels, not
proof.
I welcome suggestions, additions, corrections, and constructive
comments. And, of course, if el Goog has anything to say, just go
ahead and send me an email.
What kind of evidence would you need to be persuaded we have
Level I, II, III, or IV?