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Yes and no. Briefly: the article distinguishes "endocrinal" vs. "distributed" decisionmaking. This applies at some levels, but not at others. For individual humans, we don't have the option of rewiring our concsiousnesses, which are rather pathetically single-threaded, and can at best multitask poorly by task-switching, at a very great loss of task proficiency. Even withing collective organisations (companies, governments, organisations, communities), the multiple independent actors works where those actors' actions are autonomous and independent of others. Or, in the alternative, where they work without mutual conflict toward a common goal. But you get problems where either individual actors' motivations and actions are in conflict, or in which a single global decision must be made (as with various global catastrophic risks), and multiple independent decisions cannot be arrived at. Even for noncritical arbitrary decisions, such as which side of the road to drive on, in which there is no compelling argument to be made for one side or the other, but in which both sides cannot be simultaneously selected, you need some global decisionmaking capacity. When you reach the point of either an existing decisionmaking system (as in: a single human, with the finite and largely immutable information acquisition and processing capabilities corresponding), or a multi-agent system which must reach a common decision, you've got the challenge of limiting data intake to that amount which allows effective function within the environment, and avoids overloading capabilities or ineffective action. |
It's an attractive concept, that human society is structurally similar to a brain, and that an individual is a neuron. (If humanity is the brain, I suppose the rest of the Earth is the body. We're not doing too well as the self-appointed brain of the operation.)
My first reaction to the analogy of "endocrinal" (one-to-many) and "neural" (many-to-many) decision making, is that it's missing a primal psychological/biological motivation of humans to seek to dominate others of its own kind as well as all of nature. I'm not familiar enough with biology to say definitively, but I'm pretty sure the endocrinal system does not actively seek to subjugate the neural system (or vice versa) and dominate the whole body.
Social organization, it seems to me, is more a function of power, very small groups gaining advantage and dominance over vastly larger groups of people, than that of collaboration for mutual benefit. (I might be a bit too cynical of political motivations and authentic democracy these days.)
From the final paragraph:
> ..the current global brain is only tenuously linked to the organs of international power. Political, economic and military power remains insulated from the global brain, and powerful individuals can be expected to cling tightly to the endocrine model of control and information exchange.
I'd disagree with this, and say that the global brain (if we mean the Internet and its empowerment of globally networked intelligence) was born from the wombs of "political, economic and military power". It never achieved escape velocity to become a truly free, autonomous and collaborative, neural model of decision making.
To backtrack a bit:
> Well-connected collective entities like Google and Wikipedia will play the role of brainstem nuclei to which all other information nexuses must adapt.
The most powerfully well-connected collective entities are international political/financial/corporate entities, and indeed do they more or less dictate how all information nexuses (nexii?) must adapt.
One biological analogy that comes to mind, is how propaganda and "disinformation" act like neurotoxins in the social brain, introducing noise/entropy, skewing its coherence, and preventing well-informed and orchestrated cooperation.
Another is how established political powers have a well-developed "immune system", composed of mass media, legal structures, military/police force, surveillance of the public. This immune system could be seen at work, for example, at the environmental protests at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.
The final sentence of the article:
> This formidable design task is left up to us.
By this I assume the author means, evolving the global brain. Quite a challenge! From my perspective, it's going to be a historic struggle: design or be designed.