Cognitive Glues Are Shared Models of Relative Scarcities: The Economics of Collective Intelligence

Benjamin Frederick Lyons and Michael Levin

No 3fdya, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Collective intelligence refers to emergent problem-solving capacities that are different than those of the system’s subunits. Due to the plethora of multi-scale systems within nature and society, it is imperative to understand the interaction policies necessary and sufficient for subunits to form collective intelligences. The economy is a complex system consisting of autonomous elements at multiple scales and which exhibits adaptive problem-solving capabilities, suggesting that the economy offers an interesting and important example of collective intelligence. We identify the price system as the cognitive glue of the economy which works to coordinate the economy by acting as an affordance that allows members of the economy to use it to form plans that are mutually compatible with the plans of every other member of the economy. Using the existing collective intelligence framework of Watson and Levin [1] we elaborate on various aspects of the economy that make it useful to model the economy as a collective intelligence. We argue that any cognitive glue must solve the same kind of problem that the price system solves in broadly the same way that the price system solves it, and thus the price system serves as a generic template or abstract model for all cognitive glues. Finally, we describe some research ideas that combine concepts from biology and economics in the hopes of inspiring interdisciplinary collaboration.

Date: 2024-11-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-neu
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:3fdya

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/3fdya

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