Is Self-Organization Designable? - The Potential of Stigmergy
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First of all, Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics" and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's "General Systems Theory," which viewed biological systems and artificial systems from the same perspective, were paradigms that were known to have been followed by various studies such as "Artificial Life," "Genetic Algorithms," "Chaos," and "Complex Systems."
Also, Niklas Luhmann's "Social Systems Theory" in Germany fully adopted the concept of "Autopoiesis" created by biologist Maturana-Valera and is positioned as one of the trends in this field.
In any case, the structure in which holistic system theory confronts the "elemental reductionism" that permeates natural science in general can be said to be the most fundamental aspect of the history of scholarship in the latter half of the 20th century.
Specifically, it has focused on two points: first, that it "encourages the artificial selection of information," and second, that it "encourages the algorithmization of human behavior." The former refers specifically to the lifespan restrictions of threads, such as those called "dat drops" on 2channel, and the number of comments and tags on Nico Nico Douga. In these cases, information is not stored permanently, but rather given a finite lifespan by humans.
This is similar to synthesizing "complex systems and computers." It is also related to "collective intelligence" and "A memo like 'Curation is more reliable when done by humans than by AI'."
That's what it means. As pointed out in a conversation with architect Ryuji Fujimura ★6, Google, a search engine, has succeeded as a search engine not by performing advanced and complex calculations in the so-called AI (artificial intelligence) sense to improve search accuracy, but rather by algorithmizing humans. The basic design is extremely simple. "Humans link to information they judge to be good. If you aggregate all the logs related to the linked page, you will naturally know what is a good page." What is interesting here is that it is Google, the search robot, that treats humans as "information gathering robots". In other words, it is the fact that humans algorithmically, that is, by taking a simple and repetitive action of "linking", that the accumulation of those logs leads directly to the high performance of the search engine. It is a fact that we should confirm again that this is the basic impact of the search engine.
Among them, the concept of "stigmergy" is particularly important. It provides a very clear explanation of the mechanism of swarm behavior and colony construction behavior of ants and bees, called "social insects".
For example, when termites form a colony, it is well known that there is no leader who judges the overall situation or issues instructions after drawing up a blueprint somewhere - this is a typical example of an emergent phenomenon. However, what specific mechanism is used to organize the order? This is explained by the concept of "stigmergy" made up of "Stigma" and "Ergon". According to the same book, termites do not communicate with each other, and the product of the work done up to that point, namely the state of construction of the colony (such as the thickness and arrangement of pellets undigested material in food deposited by termites), becomes the source of information for the builders, the termites. In the words of the same book, "stimuli from the emergent structure itself can become a valuable source of information for individuals." In other words, indirect communication based on the log of the construction process. That is "stigmergy". Self-organizing phenomena based on such "stigmergy"★7 are characterized by a combination of positive and negative feedback. What is interesting here is the origin of each feedback mechanism. For example, in the case of termite colony formation, positive feedback is brought about by a simple rule of "make it where something has already been made". The authors speculate that this is probably an instinctive rule encoded in the termite's genes. On the other hand, negative feedback plays a role in putting the brakes on construction behavior that would otherwise expand without limit due to positive feedback, and stabilizing self-organizing order. For example, a rule such as "do not build a column near another column" would apply. However, the rules that cause such negative feedback do not need to be genetically encoded. This is because negative feedback is brought about by "physical limits" such as a decrease in the number of termites in the vicinity or the depletion of materials.
If repeated, in the mechanism of self-organization, positive and negative feedback are balanced, with the former resulting from some explicit rules and the latter from physical limitations. To use the words of Lawrence Lessig in " CODE - Legal, Illegal, Privacy on the Internet" (Shoeisha, 2001), the positive feedback of the former can be paraphrased as "norms" (although the norms here are innate rules encoded in genes), and the negative feedback of the latter is regulated by "architecture". From this paraphrase, it is clear that the author's idea is that in the information environment, it has become possible to artificially design the physical limitations that bring about this negative feedback as mechanisms in architecture. Since last year, the author has had the opportunity to publish essays on the new "order" on the web in various places, and the keywords used there were metaphors of a biological/ecological nature such as "ecosystem" and "generative power". More than 10 years have passed since the popularization of the Internet, and various communities and architectures (artificial structures) that support them are constantly emerging, growing, and being eliminated, making it extremely difficult to grasp the whole picture. The author first adopted biological metaphors such as "ecosystem" to decipher the phenomenon.