Complexity through socialization

In the realm of conventional, organic biology, nature has often made complex systems out of simpler ones by networking those simple systems together using social groups.

Multicellular organisms arose by aggregating single-celled organisms together. The social insects are similar aggregations of multiple individuals into a unified, functional whole.

Today, we see much the same thing with the internet - many smaller computers have been networked together into a much larger and more complex system.

It seems likely that we'll see the same thing with intelligent machines, as these develop. As humans get better at building smart machines, we will deliberately compound their power by constructing social networks out of them.

The science of social and cultural evolution is not just important for understanding the development of our own species - to applies equally to the growth of computer networks and machine intelligence.

The development of machine intelligence is humanity's most significant task at the moment. In addition to memetic engineering and memetic algorithms being key to their construction in the first place, we will have to think about the evolutionary dynamics of heterogeneous networks of humans and intelligent machines - since that's what we are most likely to see going forwards.