#distributed intelligence

The Future of AI on Personal Devices: Unlocking the Next Generation of Killer Apps WHAT’S ON MY MIND TODAY Lately I’ve been thinking about something strange and exciting: What happens when AI stops living in the cloud…and starts living inside our personal devices? Not rented intelligence.Not streamed intelligence.Owned intelligence. If large language models can run locally — on laptops,…

the answer seems too obvious to me

the whole universe is distributed intelligence emerging across infinitely diverse umwelts

If your conversations with digital personal assistants like Apple's Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, or Google Now haven’t been useful enough, a new challenger of Biblical proportions is about to arrive.

But today I was having lunch (splitting fish n' chips and drinking a blueberry marshmallow milkshake) with my hostess, her friend, and her friend's housemate who I hadn't met before. And of course the topic came up and I got all bumble-y and the housemate was like:

"Oh, so the eye is like the center of the collective consciousness and the rats are like the tentacles of an octopus, that whole distributed intelligence thing. One creature with autonomous parts."

(we had just been talking about octipodes' arm-neurons)

Bam. Two sentences. Nailed it. This is paraphrased of course, but she knew exactly what I was trying to convey through flailing.

"Hehe, you're a good me-interpreter. No one ever gets that part of it." I managed to stammer out.

"You'll find more and more people who get it as you go."

Smart sand & robot pebbles (by MITNewsOffice)

Self-sculpting sand - MIT News, April 2, 2012:

Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model. That may sound like a scene from a Harry Potter novel, but it's the vision animating a research project at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Unlike many other approaches to reconfigurable robots, smart sand uses a subtractive method, akin to stone carving, rather than an additive method, akin to snapping LEGO blocks together. A heap of smart sand would be analogous to the rough block of stone that a sculptor begins with. The individual grains would pass messages back and forth and selectively attach to each other to form a three-dimensional object; the grains not necessary to build that object would simply fall away. When the object had served its purpose, it would be returned to the heap. Its constituent grains would detach from each other, becoming free to participate in the formation of a new shape.