Introduction
In January 2021, my family and I were stopped by some unusual traffic: a long line of civilian vehicles, uniformly decorated, loaded with people and supplies. As a Marine Corps veteran, a convoy is an unmistakable sight. These formations move people and supplies around areas of operation. They may be combat patrols for security or intimidation. Civilians form convoys for a variety of less threatening reasons-- parades, traveling before personal navigation was available, etc. I didn't think much of the disrupted trffic, until four days later when a mob showed up to the United States Capitol Building in Washington, DC.
What I had witnessed was more than a simple traffic delay--it was collective intelligence in action. January 6th demonstrated how distributed individuals can unite in coordinated action without centralized control, leveraging social networks, shared narratives, and emerging technologies to amplify their impact. This phenomenon transcends political ideology; it represents a fundamental aspect of human social organization that has evolved throughout our history and is currently reaching an unprecedented zenith.
Humans are neither the first nor the only species to exhibit collective behavior, but we are undoubtedly the most sophisticated in its application. Unfortunately, we often employ it selfishly. Sometimes, this selfishness resembles the armadillo--we become solitary, armored, retreating into defensive isolation when faced with uncertainty. Other times, we behave like chimpanzees--raiding, killing, and subjugating rivals for the benefit of our troop, even at the expense of others in the same species.
At the Network Theory Applied Research Institute (NTARI), we study these patterns of collective intelligence to develop systems, protocols, and programs that can harness the power of human cooperation on a global scale. Our work aims to create an online global cooperative that transcends traditional boundaries of geography, culture, and economic systems--a digital ecosystem where collective intelligence can flourish for mutual benefit rather than zero-sum competition.
This collection of essays explores the dynamics of collective intelligence, providing a foundation for those new to the concept. We examine how elements of both the natural and technological worlds coalesce to shape global human society. My aim is to illuminate the reader's role as a node in this vast network, with the hope that each of us might better wield our influence in pursuit of a more just and functional world.
The journey begins in the natural world, where we observe collective intelligence in biological systems. From there, we explore how these natural patterns have inspired technological innovation and social organization. We then examine how monetary systems function as coordination mechanisms within our collective networks, before concluding with a glimpse into how these principles might scale beyond our planet. Throughout, I share insights from NTARI's research and development work, offering practical applications of these theoretical concepts.
I hope you'll follow the links (marked by underline) for additional information. Here are a few additional resources I couldn't fit into the article, but have added a great deal to our understanding of collective intelligence:
Natural Intelligence
In 2022, astrobiologist Adam Frank and colleagues revisited Vladimir Vernadsky's The Biosphere, a seminal work that described Earth's development through the lens of early 20th-century science. Vernadsky proposed that human knowledge and technology form a distinct planetary sphere--the noosphere, an extension of the biosphere shaped by intelligence. Frank and his team expanded on this concept using modern astrobiological theory. They argued that intelligence is not merely something that exists on a planet but rather happens to a planet--an emergent force that organizes against entropy.
Entropy manifests in many ways: predators, geological upheavals, cosmic events, and even misinformation all introduce disorder into living systems. In response, life--whether plant or animal--evolves strategies to stabilize its environment, maximizing survival and adaptation through periods of both high and low entropy. Often, these strategies involve collective behavior, where individuals coordinate to exert influence beyond their isolated capacities.
When starlings take to the sky, they do not merely flock in the structured formations seen in species like Canada geese. Geese migrate in disciplined "V" or "W" formations to reduce wind resistance, conserving energy for those flying behind. Observers can easily distinguish individual geese within the group; they remain a collection of birds, not a singular entity. Starlings, however, form something far more intricate--a dynamic, amorphous mass that moves as though it were a single, living organism, fluid yet ordered.
In 2013, researchers at Princeton University sought to understand the mechanisms behind this behavior. While previous studies had established that starlings maintain a precise spatial distance from one another, the Princeton team discovered that each bird tracks exactly seven others. These seven account for movement in six spatial directions (up, down, left, right, forward, and backward) plus one additional vector as an anticipatory adjustment based on the flock's overall motion. Unlike geese, which navigate within a two-dimensional plane despite having similar vision, starlings engage in truly three-dimensional coordination.
This ability to maintain synchrony under uncertain conditions has clear adaptive benefits. Murmurations confound predators, making it nearly impossible for a hawk or falcon to single out an individual target. Some researchers suggest the behavior may also serve a social function, attracting additional birds to join the flock. The study's authors--George F. Young, Luca Scardovi, Andrea Cavagna, Irene Giardina, and Naomi E. Leonard--explicitly described starling flocks as networks, capable of maintaining cohesion despite limited information and environmental noise.
The murmuration of starlings demonstrates how natural selection has optimized collective behavior for survival. But nature's intelligence extends beyond group coordination--it also manifests in the remarkable sensory systems of individual organisms. These biological innovations offer powerful models for technological development.
Natural Intelligence in Technology
The concept of natural networks extends beyond murmurations. Dragonflies, for example, possess a sophisticated optical network of thousands of tiny sensors within their compound eyes. As a prey object moves, each sensor captures slight shifts in position, feeding data to the insect's brain with remarkable precision. Coupled with one of the animal kingdom's most powerful flight systems--capable of independent wing movement--this network allows dragonflies to intercept prey with near-perfect accuracy. The principles underlying dragonfly vision have indeed inspired missile defense systems.
At NTARI, natural intelligence strategies inform our approach to system design. Unlike traditional, resource-intensive models, biological networks are inherently optimized for efficiency, resilience, and adaptability by employing what the collection of nodes alredy have in common. Murmurations serve both as peaceful communal displays and as defensive formations under threat. Dragonflies' visual networks aid both in evasion and in attack. Similarly, human societies balance cooperation and conflict through layers of culture, law, and technology.
Research like Robin Dunbar's suggests humans can maintain stable relationships with approximately 150 individuals (Dunbar's Number), offering insight into the cognitive constraints on social interaction. Yet, history shows that civilization continuously pushes past these limits. Ancient Rome housed over a million residents at its peak, and in 2023, Metro Manila had a population density exceeding 73,000 people per square mile.
How do we manage such complexity beyond our biological limits? Through layered social structures--legal systems, social norms, and ever-evolving technologies that facilitate order, communication, and adaptation. These structures allow us to cooperate at scales far beyond our biological capabilities, enabling coordination among millions or even billions of individuals. While Dunbar's Number suggests a natural limit to our social cognition, our technological and institutional innovations effectively extend this capacity, creating nested networks of interaction that span the globe.
Humans have had artificial social structures ever since we began farming in large communities. Before agriculture we were hunter gatherers, highly regulated by nature itself. Agriculture placed the natural world under our control, exempting us from (some of) its laws if we choose. Statecraft is what this kind of organization is often called and it is how we've gone from the primitive and inefficient dictatorial model to a very loose global republic.
While these biological systems provide inspiration for technological design, human collective intelligence has evolved its own infrastructure--one that increasingly spans the globe through digital networks. This infrastructure builds upon and extends far beyond our biological capabilities, creating new possibilities for coordination at unprecedented scales.
the New Noosphere
Along with beautiful articles like the Litany Against Fear, Frank Herbert, author of the Dune series, wrote within his narrative:
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a human mind."
Predating the portions of the story about Leto and Paul Atreides, the Butlerian Jihad was an interplanetary war between humans and sentient machines in the Dune universe. This wasn't a war like we see in the Terminator franchise where machines are the instigators of genocide. Instead, humanity realized its need to think for itself, to sort out its own desires, ambitions, and problems. So, they violently destroyed the machines and found ways of capitalizing on the capabilities of the machines' inspiration--the natural human mind.
Memory formation involves neurons firing in sequential patterns with varying intensity. As they fire in sequence, the fact that a neuron is firing or not, influences the "shape" of a memory. For those interested in deeper explanations, I recommend entries #36 and #42 in the Meerkat Library found at https://www.ntari.org/themeerkatlibrary.
Similar to the brain, digital systems operate on a binary foundation, where transistors represent either 1 or 0-- on or off. A transistor is a switch for an electrical circuit. The combination of millions of these circuits being on or off forms the foundation of digital computation ability and data representation.
Computers utilize standardized encoding systems to represent information. For example, the letter "A" is represented as "01000001" in the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) Binary Character Table. Unicode, a more comprehensive encoding system, allows for multiple languages and represents characters with one to four bytes. The entire Unicode module for the Python programming language is relatively compact at 1.2 megabytes (10 million bits), while modern smartphones with 1TB of storage contain approximately 8 trillion transistors. Desktop and server computers contain many more, making each device extremely capable of computing and processing data from the broader network. Because transistors use semiconductors (metals with low voltage potential), the cost of data storage, computation, and transmission is reasonably affordable in the modern world.
The transistor was invented in 1947 at Bell Telephone Laboratories, but the first known analog computing device, the Antikythera mechanism, dates back to between 200 and 70 BCE. This was a highly specialized and rare mechanical device for astronomy; few like it have ever been found. The first general-purpose electronic computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), was built approximately 2,000 years later, becoming operational in 1945.
Modern digital communications evolved from several historical technologies, including the Transatlantic Telegraph Cable (established between 1858 and 1866), semaphores, and postal systems. The ARPANET, developed beginning in 1969, became the foundation of today's internet, further advanced by the official adoption of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) in 1983. While some argue that multiple internet communication systems exist, divided by geography, language, technology, or protocols the fundamental architecture of the internet remains unified--a globally distributed data network.
That doesn't mean all parts of the internet are equally accessible. Like the subconscious mind, the deep web contains content that can't be found with standard search engines. This includes--but is not limited to--the dark web, where specialized configurations allow people to connect with enhanced anonymity. The web most of us are familiar with is the surface web, where social media platforms dominate and shape our understanding of what it means to be online and what content is available.
Social media platforms are closed systems that cater to the most profitable audiences. This structure draws the "echo chamber" critique often leveled at mainstream media channels. However, due to the sheer volume of data contained in any single platform, this phenomenon is comparable to the inherent limitations of any knowledge repository, whether a local library or a specific university's curriculum. If Dunbar's number is any indication of our cognitive limits, we simply cannot process the entirety of available information from so many sources without technological assistance. AI is helping us, as agentic AI systems can collate the opinions and thoughts of a community into a singular expression.
Agentic AI systems offer a potential solution to the information overload problem that limits effective collective intelligence. By aggregating, analyzing, and synthesizing the diverse perspectives within a community, these systems can produce coherent representations of collective thought that would be impossible for any individual to achieve through manual effort. At NTARI, we envision AI not as a replacement for human decision-making but as an augmentation that extends our collective cognitive capacities, much as social institutions extended our abilities beyond Dunbar's number.
Considerable inspiration for AI design clearly comes from the human brain, but under what circumstances we should use these systems is still under consideration. At NTARI we like AI tools, and we're excited to employ agentic AI.
We recently offered to help the Jefferson County Public School system customize a version of Madrid City Counsel's Consul Democracy. Our plan was and still is to augment the system with a user-user regulator and agentic AI. The Leveson-Based Trade Assessment System (LBTAS) regulates user-to-user interactions while the AI will collect and aggregate the objectives of the community acting as its own superintendent rather than relying on a human who may be politically, socially or economically motivated over and above their responsibility to the community. We can do a lot with AI, and we think we should.
The physical and digital infrastructure of our global network provides the foundation, but the rules governing interaction within this network--our protocols--determine how effectively we can harness collective intelligence. Among the most fundamental and consequential of these protocols is our monetary system.
We Don't Do That Here
Balaji Srinivasan mentions an in-person level of civility as a trait of network states. NTARI is not a network state, but Balaji's lucid contemplations provide examples of what can be done with internet-based society. What he implies is that social mores can be established online and executed by humans in the real world. This is a whole lot easier than it sounds. Books achieve this phenominon and at one time were just as heavily critiqued as internet users are today. Just think of how people interact today vs. pre mobile internet. Internet users have become Belle while everyone else creeps toward the spirit of Gaston.
That said, establishing the right programming according to media format is also tricky, because we don't necessarily want to trigger the behaviors we observe today. Regular internet users intuitively know, the internet and its connectivity are a big deal, but to date platform designers haven't necessarily figured out how to format for maximum user benefit.
As network engineers, we have chosen a philosophy that provides a better template for guiding human behavior-- better than for-profit GDP-based methods used by traditional technology companies. As a result, our motivations are not clouded. This is a nice thing to say, but as you will soon see our platforms will not contain advertisements or profit-based promotional algorithms that only benefit us on the backend.
Money was designed as a mechanism to facilitate the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural civilization during the Stone Age. It functioned as an "exclusive" system in that it exempts those without money from fully participating in the new society by accessing its benefits without contribution. Productive labor provided an entry point for those willing to contribute to the demands of maintaining and expanding agricultural communities.
As a network protocol, money coordinates human behavior across vast scales, synchronizing the activities of billions of individuals without requiring direct communication. It serves as a mechanism of collective intelligence by encoding value judgments made by the collective and transmitting those signals throughout the network. When we purchase goods or services, we're effectively casting votes for particular forms of production and distribution. This parallel processing of countless individual decisions produces emergent properties--market trends, price movements, and economic cycles--that reflect the aggregate intelligence of the network.
While this system appears functionally neutral on the surface, it's worth noting that some of the oldest professions outside of agriculture (which began more as a lifestyle than a formal occupation) include activities like prostitution, stealing and slavery.
Today, very few people operate outside of the economic data stream, and can scarcely imagine the a world without it's communicative functions. Money as a medium was enhanced by Romans after the fall of the republic, who began using currency not just as a medium of exchange, but as a vehicle for maintaining sovereignty and power. The legacy of this practice is still evident in the portraits of political and social leaders on modern currencies. The exclusionary function also persists, often deployed as a means of enforcing compliance with international norms.
Over time, the conditions for economic participation have become more complex. Modern regulations typically function to keep people "in" the system rather than allowing them to exit into truly independent subsistence. For example, in the United States, property ownership generally entails perpetual taxation, ensuring ongoing participation in the broader economic system. This clearly serves a social good, as Thomas Paine highlighted in the first chapter of his 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense. We need each other, and our capacity for collective action increases when we unite in mutual support.
The underlying logic of modern monetary systems contains flaws that have persisted since ancient times. Instead of fundamentally redesigning this foundation, we've built elaborate structures upon it, leading to periodic market crashes, financial crimes, and hoarding behaviors among people who might otherwise share resources more generously.
What We Do
At NTARI, we develop networks that serve users mutually. We reject the notion of excluding anyone from the benefits of the planet's abundance, having witnessed the harmful consequences of such exclusion firsthand. We recognize what that means for our privilaged place in the US economy and have taken precautions to respect those statutes, but the challenge we confront is not specific individuals or networks, but rather principles and perceptions that fail to align with physical reality-- a planet and a universe capable of providing prosperity and abundance for our entire species, if we properly organize.
One of our signature network protocols is the open-source, Leveson-Based Trade Assessment System (LBTAS). This assessment is meant to replace the traditional but practically useless 5-star rating system, which has its origin as corporate propaganda rather than an intentional carrier of social and economic information. MIT Professor Nancy Leveson designed the system's inspiration to evaluate aircraft software in order to prevent safety issues and provide useful feedback to development teams.
LBTAS uses -1 to positive 4 as possible values, with -1 meaning the developer caused harm to someone or an adjacent system, while +4 means the developer provided a product that anticipated needs the customer did not even foresee. This nuanced approach allows for more meaningful feedback than conventional binary "like/dislike" or five-star systems, which fail to capture the full spectrum of user experience. By encoding more detailed information about interactions, the LBTAS enhances the collective intelligence of the network, facilitating more effective allocation of attention and resources. I adapted this system into code last year and it is available on Github.
As we refine our protocols for Earth-bound cooperation, we must also consider how these systems might scale beyond our planet. Science fiction offers thought experiments in interstellar cooperation that can inform our present-day network design.
The Intergalactic Network
I mentioned Frank Herbert and Dune earlier and they are worth mentioning again. Dune is a science fiction story set far in the future, and has interesting themes that run through the media of the time (worm-human hybrids for example: see Jabba the Hutt and Leto Atredies II) but Herbert is clearly a polymath and not an epic storyteller like George Lucas. Dune’s fictional humanity cannot communicate effortlessly across space and time but are limited by real physics.
Radio waves are light and so travel at 299,792,458 meters per second. A lot of the internet's infrastructure broadcasts signals at this speed, slowed only by network junctions and the speed of the receiving device. On a planet the size of Earth, the result is really fast, and within the solar system it beats the hell out of sending a mailman.
In the Martian, a marooned hero relays signals from Mars to Earth with a realistic 8-24 minute delay for response. In 1901 the first transAtlantic telegraph took 16.5 hours to transmit. a 99-word message from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan. Voyager 1, which is currently about 15 billion miles from Earth can be reached with radio in 22 hours.
In Dune, humanity has spread so far into the stars, Earth became irrelevant long ago. The closest real star to Earth is Proxima Centauri, at 4.25 light years away. It would take most of a decade to send and receive a response at that distance. How doescommunication work in Herbert's mind?
He explains this through character narrations of Spacing Guild operations. First of all, their ships are propelled by somehow folding spacetime and creating a wormhole, which facilitates instantaneous travel. As a ship arrives in orbit, it exchanges messages with the surface network using radio waves as cargo and passengers are managed, then continues to the next system. The algorithm used to prioritize messages between ships and planets is only implied, but would likely resemble a giant TCP/IP diagram, only the network-network junctions are spaceships, planets, moons, asteroids and stations throughout the cosmos.
Herbert's fiction offers a fascinating thought experiment in distributed communication design. While we cannot fold space as the Spacing Guild does, the model of ships as mobile network nodes carrying both physical goods and information packets between fixed nodes represents a scalable approach to interstellar collective intelligence. This model of store-and-forward communication, where messages hop from node to node using a vehicle, resembles both postal systems and modern internet routing protocols, suggesting that certain network architectures may prove universal regardless of the scale or technology involved.
Conclusions
The move into the digital communications age is much like the move from the Stone Age to the Bronze. We are working with new material in communications. We no longer have to rely on collections of coins or people to establish our markets or coordinate our varying opinions, we can do that by managing transistor states of countless devices from the here to Voyager 1.
It also resembles the move from Bronze Age to Iron Age. Iron isn't as strong or resilient as bronze, but it's more accessible and so democratized tool making in its time the way the internet democratizes intellectual access, mass broadcast and a global awareness.
We are fortunate to be alive today. We are experiencing the genesis of a new human ability. Today, we can see a future where we become to the universe as ants are to the soil of Earth, but what good is that if we end up fighting the intergalactic wars Dune cautions against? We need to find ways of being one. One species, one planet, one general directive. Else, we risk dooming ourselves and all the life that we know of in the universe. It is all here on Earth after all.
In this age we must go to war over consensus, not control. Our weapons must be reason, logic and reference, not subterfuge, bombs or rhetoric. Our objective must be to cultivate and preserve life by continuing to alter the geosphere and biosphere, but not as roving, territorial bands bent on limited profit , but a living, responsive collective cultivating life in the planet and one another.
NTARI is engineering the foundations of a brighter future by returning to where it all began. The Oholo II people are the first known instance of agriculture-like behavior in humans. They collected weeds and specific grains and herbs much like modern gardeners. It was the efforts of early humans like them, that led to the prosperity we know today. As AI and robotics promise even greater personal autonomy and social responsibility, we must consider how our species will shift protocols to stabilize global society during the transition. Will we copy and paste the starling's collective intelligence model, or the chimpanzee's or the lions? Or will we study our terrestrial neighbors and create something much more clever?
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About Jodson B. Graves
Jodson is a communications engineer certified by the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences and the Defense Information School. He and his wife Grace founded the Institute in 2023 after serving in United States Marine Corps communication strategy and operations. Jodson currently leads the Institute as president of the board, curator of the Meerkat Library, and architect of the Agrinet project.
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