The new owner got a little dorm-roomy when mass layoffs began at the company. In the early hours of Thursday, Musk wrote :
"Because it consists of billions of bidirectional interactions per day, Twitter can be thought of as a collective, cybernetic, super-intelligence."
This was a crazy thing to think about, given all the chaos that Musk was going to cause on the social networking site. His thought process was revealed by it. Musk has been concerned about the dangers of all-powerful superintelligences. It would have been high on his list of reasons not to buy the company if it were like that. He might not have seen that caveat until he was the emptor. Maybe the price he paid for the social network wasn't the only thing high.
Musk found a rich theoretical vein. When flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of cattle, swarms of bees, and sometimes drones and software agents work together, they do preternaturally intelligent things.
Musk said he was going to do something big. Some biologists, anthropologists, and information theorists believe that Musk's bird app shows some signs of being flocks. All the likes and faves, the mutual follows and shares, turn us individual users into something bigger, smarter and weirder. The mechanisms for how that works could one day help tame the crappier aspects of social media. It is possible to understand social media as a collective.
I don't believe that Musk meant that. He got every implication of the larger thought wrong since he hit on the idea of a collective intelligence. He doesn't know what he bought or how it works. Whether Musk manages to hold this thing together or spin it into shards, his deeper misunderstanding should make all of us more concerned about the future of social media than we already are. If there is a group of superbrains, that could be a problem.
Musk was correct.
When a group of people follow simple rules such as "turn right when the guy nearest you turns right" or "Make an alarmed noise when you hear an alarmed noise," they become a collective. All sorts of complicated cooperative actions arise from these tiny instruction sets, like a weaver creating an intricate pattern just by repeating a few simple flicks of their loom. Emergent behaviors are called by scientists.
Animals have to communicate. The beautiful murmurations of starlings or quick en-masse undulations of anchovy schools can be created by fish and birds using visual signals. There are audible calls used by hienas. The ants are laying down trail. What about people? We have something to say. We trade information that way.
Social networks are collectives in that way. Where else do you find so many humans talking to each other on social media? There are things like Arab Springs that emerge from collectives. There are rules of interaction among people. A researcher at the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University studies this stuff. That's different from the question of whether we are processing information and making good decisions.
The idea that understanding the collectivist nature of social networks might make them better caught the attention of Musk. People talk on social networks. The twist is that social networks change the way that information is spread. Our words speed up. The signals of trustworthiness our brains have evolved to look for are not available to us. It's possible that the bird closest to you is trying to trick you into voting for Trump. It's because we're all more likely to spread signals that are new, surprising, or emotionally fraught.
There is at least one upside. One simple tweaking could make a social network a lot more pleasant, as was pointed out by a group of his colleagues in a paper last year. To make it harder for a single expression to go viral, you need to tap the brakes.
After just a few degrees of separation, signals begin to degrade in most high- functioning networks. The lords and masters of social media could set their systems so that when an idea threatens the internet, circuitbreakers close. Think of it as a mask and a meme. It might take a bit more time to spread fresh ideas. The germs will be removed from the environment.
It's possible that the desire for a better filtering system is the reason so many people are moving to Mastodon. Wideband communication isn't as easy on Mastodon's many server because they have their own rules of behavior. The tech writer Clive Thompson put it like that. The experience is more pleasant due to the network's dislike of speed and distance.
Musk isn't doing anything like that. He was able to figure out what the social networking site is called. He didn't understand how it works or why.
"Emil Musk was wrong." That's a familiar phrase.
When the group itself decides on a course of action, collectives emerge. The self-organizing is interfered with by the rails of the networks. Musk doesn't seem to know that if he doesn't allow it to have a mind of its own, it won't be a collective cybergenius.
The invisible hand of social behavior is being exposed by Elon. The invisible hand of collective intelligence will bring a utopia with free speech and no violence. It's similar to the claim that the economy will work itself out on Joe Rogan's radio show.
Rules and regulations are similar to an economy. The rules that are used by most of the social networks are designed to increase conflict. The chairs are small and the thermostat is high. What's the reason? We click because of all those choices. "They drive up engagement and mine our attention to feed us ads, which we engage with and buy stuff, and that leads to revenue for the site," she said.
Collective cognitive development can't happen if all of its members are making fun of each other. Iain Couzin is the director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior at the University of Konstanz and is an expert in collective behavior. The analogy fails because we don't have natural selection on social media. Human social networks don't have that property.
Had the capitalists left the social network to its own devices, it could have become a collective superintelligence. The possibility of collective cognitive ability is excluded by the ads that make it profitable. They kill the superintelligence in its infancy, and in its place we have a dumb machine designed to make more money.
The truth is between the two. Musk was wrong about how he was correct. A social network on rails could be a superintelligence that will be very hardcore in pursuit of profits.
The nature of Twitter's superintelligence, like Musk's, remains a matter of faith.
Social networks can be kind or gentle, according to the science of collectivity. Think of all the different ways to use social media: short video clips, long blogs entries, short text, still pictures, moderated, anonymous, and so on. All of the for-profit ones have ended up in bad shape. The foremost experts in the field will admit they don't know how to fix it.
Duncan Watts is a computational social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has worked at Yahoo and Microsoft. Watts says that finding some science to tame social networks would be great. It's so far away from what most of social science has established that we don't know anything useful at all.
It's difficult to study collectives. The networks are run by public companies. Don't even think about it. "We don't have a clue," he says. I don't think there's a clue. If Musk decided to replace the current recommendation system with a new one, we wouldn't be able to tell you what that would do.
The same thing is said by the same person. He says that it would be helpful if there was an openness about the technology. There is an ethical aspect to the control of the information.
What did Musk do immediately after taking over? The team that studied this stuff was fired by him. The nature of Musk's superintelligence is still a matter of faith.
It's the fact that so many people are leaving it that's the most intriguing piece of evidence that supports the idea of a superintelligence on the internet.
One of the most basic things a collective can do is move. Many of the hallmarks we see in animal networks can be seen in the way everyone is moving across the digital veldt towards Mastodon.
That's not just any network of animals. We are all looking for a new home. When a hive breaks down, honeybee swarms send out scouts with specifications for a perfect nest, like size of entrance, location, and so on. They are the people who know about honeybees. They fly back to the cluster of bees to argue their case after finding a candidate location. By moving around.
Each scout has a choreographed way of going to the site. The scout dances, recruiting other scouts and non-scout bees to it's moves, if the site is good. Until only one team is left, the scene turns into a dance-off. Everyone learns the new nest's coordinates from the bees aligning into a Bollywood number. They all stop buzzing.
Is it better to bee or not to bee. The dance-off phase has begun with Musk's company. My experience of the past couple of weeks has been that of a bee watching the scouts come back. Some go toward Mastodon while others go down to Co Host. I've learned some new dance moves. If the superintelligence starts singing a cover of "Daisy" and collapses into a pile of chips, I will be sad. I'm looking forward to being part of a new collective wherever we find our next hive-mind.
The analogy is imperfect. The scientists pointed out that people can't be compared to insects. Humans are smarter than bees.
Oh yeah, uh-huh. Yes, we are.
Adam Rogers is a reporter.
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