Social super-organisms appear everywhere in nature, from the communities of cells that comprise the body, to pack animals and insect colonies. These biological entities can be described as closely interacting networks of communicating biological objects. Life on earth has repeatedly discovered this paradigm (Interacting Objects) in its exploration of evolutionarily stable strategies. We suggest that these structures are optimized for information processing, as exemplified by the networks of interacting neurones in the brain. Distributed information processing across the network facilitates the emergence of radically new behaviour at the 'higher', system-level, allowing the rapid development of new, stable behaviours. These networks of Interacting Objects, if stable enough, can form the nodes of yet higher level networks, forming a layered stack. At the top of this stack, which can be extended back to sub-atomic particles, is human society. Unique in nature, humans can engineer their interaction networks on time scales faster than 'classical' evolution-by-genetic-mutation. Thus, we have the opportunity to design modes of communication that maximize information processing, and hence maximise human productivity.

1. Wikipedia and the Global Brain. Dan Bolser and Jong Bhak B i O conference 2009

3. Social super-organisms

6. Representation as BiO

10. Information processing

14. Clip (swarming bats.mpg)

15. Stable networks of interactions form the nodes of ‘higher level’ networks

22. Human interaction networks can be designed

23. Clip (swarming fish.mpg) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIgHEhziUxU

29. Thanks Thank you for interacting! Thanks to every node in the giant network of interactions that forms the information processing architecture of the universe! Thanks to Don Stockbauer for many discussions about the GB, and for providing the examples.

31. a) memory b) processes A system for ‘ information processing ’ must have: