Abstract
The idea that humanity with its different civilizations and cultures can be understood as a complex organism, a superorganism, goes back to ancient times. In history, humanity has always used tools and technologies to guarantee its survival and to make life easier. Today’s technologies, especially ICT, have greater effects in their promotion of the collective human intelligence and behavior. ICT can be considered in the context of global networking processes as a digital nervous system of humanity. Communication (technical and social) is the driving force for humanity in reading the next stage of evolution, the so-called global superorganism. This development is based on cultural cooperation, whereby humanity with the Internet, artificial intelligence and big data is increasingly becoming an intelligent human-technology system. Main cultural challenges humanity has to deal with are inclusion, balance between centralized and distributed control mechanisms and protecting nature and cultural sensitivities. This is possible in the context of sustainable development and facilitates global empathy.
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Notes
- 1.
Aristotle was fascinated by the bee and ant colonies as a reference point for understanding societies. “The whole is more than the sum of its parts” indicates, in a certain sense, the dimension of a complex superorganism. The interaction of two components can generate independent new qualities. In systems theory one speaks of emergence or emergent properties [267, 268].
- 2.
It is interesting in this context, that the immune system protects the people even if they know nothing about its existence or partially understand its function.
- 3.
With cells or protozoa in this connection one speaks about first-order systems [280].
- 4.
Time is a common denominator for cultures, even if there are differences, for example the physical measurement or also the perception of time.
- 5.
The number of possible connections between N nodes in a graph is \(\dfrac{N\cdot (N-1)}{2}\). This term grows proportional to \(N^2\) for N large.
- 6.
Here is again an analogy to the biological body of a human.
- 7.
The capacity of information of a person may in future even go far beyond what people naturally are equipped with. One thinks of possible chip implants with connection to the central nervous system [512].
- 8.
Already Konrad Zuse said that one day there would be calculating machines (chess brain), which would be able to defeat the chess world champion. However, it was for him not only about the calculating machine, but about the corresponding chess program [527].
- 9.
Karl W. Steinbuch (1917–2005) was a German computer scientist, cyberneticist, and electrical engineer. He was an early pioneer of German computer science, in particular in the field of artificial neural networks. He also wrote about the interaction of society and modern media.
- 10.
On this questions originate with regard to the juridical arrangement. Who has the responsibility in case of an accident? Currently the situation is in such a way that the (human) driver must be able to take over the control of the car any time and he also has the (sole) responsibility [257].
- 11.
One has to note that Adam Smith has been both an economist and a moral philosopher. In his work “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” [424] he does not claim that (rational) egoism (always) leads to the prosperity of a nation, but that this is the case only if the self-interested behavior is limited and long-term (meaning sustainable in the sense of this book) focused.
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Ünver, H. (2018). The Global Superorganism as an Intelligent Human-Technology System. In: Global Networking, Communication and Culture: Conflict or Convergence?. Studies in Systems, Decision and Control, vol 151. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76448-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76448-1_7
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