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| Detritus evolving in slow-moving stream: 8/30/10 CC Jean Stimmell |
According
to a recent Reuters’ news report: They look vaguely like miniature hockey
pucks skittering along on three pin-like metal legs, but a swarm of small
robots called Kilobots at a laboratory at Harvard University is making a little
bit of history for automatons everywhere. Researchers who created a battalion of 1,024 of these robots
said on Thursday the mini-machines are able to communicate with one another and
organize themselves into two-dimensional shapes like letters of the alphabet.
In a recent blog,
I write about an eerily similar process: swarming phenomena in nature, this
time evolving spontaneously through emergent behavior.
I quote Joseph Cambray’s
definition of emergent behavior: it is a process that happens whenever “particles interact with one another,
whatever they are, whether people or atoms, and if they interact in a
competitive environment, they have the capacity to self organize, and once they
start to self organize, you get new properties that are completely unexpected,
that’s what emergence is.”[i]
Cambray uses a mind-blowing example:
“This was something I picked up in some scientific publications,
it had nothing to do with psychology. These are beetle larvae from the Mojave
desert. They tend to clump, a number of them all get on to a little branch,
and… they make a kind of lumpy shape that apparently looks enough like a female
bee, and gives off the right pheromone, that male bees try to come and mate
with this clump. In the process, these beetle larvae, which are parasitic,
attach themselves to some of the chest hairs of the male bee, and then when the
male bee leaves, he carries them around to an actual mating event with a
female, they transfer on her back, they’re carried by her to the hive, where
they then eat the pollen. If they don’t do this, this is what’s remarkable, if
they don’t do this, they can’t complete their life cycle. So that the creation
of this bee-like structure is an emergent form. There’s no image inside these
creatures to build a bee, and there’s nobody telling them how to do this, it’s
a spontaneous self-organization into that form.[ii]
If Cambray is correct that
there was no image programed inside these creatures to build a model of a bee;
and if, in fact, there’s no one telling the larvae how to do this, then this
is, indeed, an example of spontaneous self-organization.
Remember that spontaneous
self-organization is an inherent function of Mother Nature, happening whenever particles interact with one another in a
competitive environment, whether the particles be atoms, animals or people.
If that’s indeed the case, why
won’t the swarm of tiny robots built in Harvard’s laboratory also exercise
emergent behavior: developing new properties that are completely unexpected.
We may be witnessing the first
faltering steps of a unique type of singularity. Could it be that emergent
behavior is Mother Nature’s way to coevolve through human technology?
