Theory

This is a part one of a four part series of emergent microbial communication. “Quorum sensing”, “quorum quenching”. Cool words, what are we talking about here?

Researchers analysing 1,245 natural vocal interactions found that wild common marmosets use flexible turn-taking, matched call-response sequences, brief pauses, and very little overlap across both within-group and intergroup exchanges.

Long before the dawn of modern parenting, animals laid eggs and moved on, leaving their progeny to fend for themselves. Now, a study published in Nature uncovers one of the elegant ways that evolution transformed neglect into nurture.

This paper proposes “Embodied Collective Intelligence,” where robot teams share world memory, task progress, and skill experience without becoming a centralized super-agent.

This funding call frames AI safety as a population-level problem involving collusion, cascading failures, emergent communication, and collective capabilities. This closes 9-August-2026.

“Agentic AIs are a feral technology… they are projected to become a wild, self-sustaining, population.” Co-organised with Morgan Stanley, this upcoming Santa Fe Institute gathering takes place 15-Sept-2026 in NYC.

A June workshop dedicated specifically to distributed collective intelligence, including bio-inspired approaches, decentralized trust systems, artificial life concepts, and collective behavior in smart systems.

A notable June event from the Santa Fe Institute, co-sponsored by OpenAI and Google DeepMind, focused on intelligence across multiple organisational and social scales rather than intelligence as an individual phenomenon.

Researchers from SUPSI and ETH Zurich developed a firefly-inspired visible-light communication system for nano-drone swarms using LEDs and convolutional neural networks for message decoding.

By encoding interaction rules directly into physical structure, researchers showed that coordinated group behavior can emerge without digital control, sensors, or centralized systems.