The boids the boids !!!

The Basic BOID

Boids are an artificial intelligence entity that simulates flock activity. Very complex and realistic flock activity can be generated from very simple rules -- from Wikipedia:

• separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates
• alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates
• cohesion: steer to move toward the average position (center of mass) of local flockmates

More complex rules can be added, such as obstacle avoidance and goal seeking.

Boid-like rules and flock behavour can easily be observed in human populations.

Separation, Alignment and Cohesion in typical human settlement 

Humans demonstrate how human intelligence allows us to flock more perfectly than birds.

Being so much smarter than birds, fish and bacteria, humans are able to flock in complex non-physical dimensions to produce flocks like political parties, corporations and nation-states. However the principles of separation, alignment and cohesion still apply. No good human flocker wants to be exactly like his fellow flocker (we all want to "think for ourselves"), but wants to be facing roughly in the same direction and moving at the same speed as his or her immediate neighbors. This relatively mindless conformity produces mass flocking movements of thousands or millions of individuals that closely resemble the behavour of fish and birds. In this respect at least,the shape and behavour of human flocks is remarkably less intelligent than what any individual flocker could produce on his or her own.

As pointed out above, it is possible to produce different flock behavour by varying the simple rules in simple ways. In the case of humans, language or even skin color barriers can break the "cohesion" and produce random, unpredictable results. Flocking also breaks down when the flockee starts to become aware of individuals who are not immediate neighbors or even the same species.

All this results in the eternal human dilemma: Who shall I flock with?

Simple boid-like rules go a long way to explaining why humans are so easily assimilated. In other writings, I will refer to this as the boid hypothesis.

Boid Hypothesis

Humans are not birds, but perhaps the rules that govern human groups are simple, like those governing the flocking behavour of birds and fish. More precisely, the issue is how much of the flocking behavour of humans can be described by simple rules and how much these simple rules form the "gravity" behind assimilation. To be blunt, we use the boid hypothesis to rule out more sophisticated (and flattering) "official" reasons for the group in favor of simple almost physical flocking rules. For example, we need not look into reasons why people listen to pop music,  join the armed forces or get tatoos. Flocking rules cover almost the whole phenomenon.

For humans, finding the right flock to fly with is extremely complex. It's a bit like being a fish on a coral reef, surrounded by hundreds of different species. If you want to mate (one adaptive function of flocking) you need to recognize individuals of the right flock. In nature, this is done by markings that are not adaptive in themselves but serve merely to identify flock mates. In humans, this can be as simple as the approved hair cut, jacket, skirt length or eye makeup.

This idea is very similar to one I came up with in 1977: the "Credal Group". That was the idea that we form groups based on nothing but agreement to "believe" in a basically meaningless "creed". The creed allows us to perform the one fundamental thing we need to form a group: identify insiders and outsiders. In 1977, I noticed that Creeds are necessarily meaningless. Any trace of actual contact with verifiable reality would threaten the usefulness of the creed. Best to have something anyone can say without it impacting their lives in any way other than being their "ticket" to join the flock. Once accepted as a member of the flock, it is very unwise to threaten individuality by attempting to discuss the creed. For example, in practice, "theology" is the last thing discussed in social gatherings of Christians.

Flocks present an interesting paradox. The flockee must minimize the difference between other flock members but also stand out as an individual (a requirement of the sexual reproduction process). You can see this problem in a flock of a million penguins - indistinguishable by the human eye but, to any penguin, a million individuals. In humans and penguins, "individuality" is often achieved by aggressive conformity - being the prototypical flockee.

Assimilation

The original title of this blog was "Dragon Theory", which referred to my idea that humans create organizations that are alive in some sense and, in another sense, are machines like other human creations. There is a "flip side" to this theory. It's about how humans are assimilated into this machine. It turns out that assimilation is an easier thing for most of us to understand, since intelligent machines are (for most of us) a subject of Science Fiction ("AI"). In fiction, "AI" is presented for dramatic purposes as something super-human and implacably opposed to human life. "Real" AI is something else entirely. It presents a real and present threat precisely because it is so poorly understood.

The concept of assimilation is quite familiar to most of us. We take it for granted that "social" animals form entities (herds, swarms, flocks, schools) that have a behavior all their own - behavour that cannot be described solely as the sum of behavior of the individuals. Application of this idea to humans is, for some strange reason, resisted.

In the case of humans, social structure is more than a matter of simply sticking together for the purpose of hunting and safety. Human societies are intelligently designed. In this sense, they are intelligent machines.

It's also true that the way that humans are absorbed in these social structures (assimilated) is uniquely complex.  In this post, I'd like to focus on the most common and most powerful ways we are all assimilated:

• Being Alive.  To be alive is to actively participate in the Universe. This forces us to divide the world into things useful, things dangerous, "me" and "not me", "mine" and "not mine" ...
• Being Human. Obviously, we all share a human mind and body, making it hard to relate to such things as the immorality of driving species to extinction. We share a mortal time-frame of less than a century. Our senses are dull but our minds are full of speculations that would never occur to an animal with comparable intelligence (such as a dolphin).
• Culture. The most obvious aspect of culture is language, which limits what kinds of thoughts we can share and even the kind of thoughts we can have. Especially in the "West", philosophers have over-emphasize the role of language. Culture includes "technology" which surrounds us, opening all kinds of possibilities but also limiting the way we see the world. For example, if we have a gun, we will tend to use the gun to solve our problems with society. If we have poison, we will use it to exclude inconvenient living things from "our" environment.
• Flocking. The boid hypothesis hold that a great deal of human "group" behavour can be explained by simple rules governing all kinds of flocks and swarms. Deep psychology is not required.

Built on our common humanity and the fact that we are all absorbed into some kind of culture from birth, other powerful forces are brought to bear:

• Mythology. Structures our lives with a complex set of stories that provide a sense of "meaning" and direction (as long as they are not held up to close scrutiny)
• Economics, especially the mythology of money. For the vast majority of human beings in 2017, money (and the need for it) is as real as air.
• Status. Backed by cultural myths, human societies seem to automatically stratify into "haves" and "have-nots" - leaders and followers.
• Brute Force. We cannot overlook the fact that, for most of humanity, there is no choice but to participate in society, even at the most desperately poor and disadvantaged level. When we go to war, most of us are "cannon fodder" with our individuality seen as an inconvenience and obstacle to the functioning of the war machine. On the other hand, when the tools of brute force are placed in our hands, we tend to use them - turning others into objects that exist only to further our personal ambitions. Ironically, such ambitions are themselves a product of assimilation. The oppressor is as assimilated as the oppressed.

All these forces can add up to the dragon/assimilation phenomenon where, for example, young men can excuse the slaughter of "enemy" civilians as "just doing my job". Such mental gymnastics would be completely incomprehensible if we ignored the process that turns a helpless, innocent child into a mindless, expendable component in a war machine.