RECENT FORUM TOPICS
• Ant Colonies as Distributed, Multi-Agent Systems –
Deborah M. Gordon with Peter Norvig

• Biology's Second Law – J Scott Turner (link below)

• First Life – David Deamer with Chris McKay and
Andrew Pohorille

• Ice, Sea Level, and Contemporary Climate Change – Kurt M. Cuffey

• Learning from Bacteria about Social Networks –
Eshel Ben-Jacob

• Life before genetics: autogenesis, information and the outer solar system – Terrence Deacon

• Life of Super-Earths: How the Hunt for Alien Worlds and Artificial Cells will Revolutionize Life on our Planet – Dimitar Sasselov

• Mammalian Response to Climate Change – Past,
Present, and Future – Elizabeth Hadly

• Mineralogical Co-Evolution of the Geo- and
Biosphere – Robert Hazen

• Rare Earth: What We Know Now – Peter D. Ward

• Turing's Cathedral – George Dyson

• Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age – Jack Copeland

M|M Forum debates the impact of life-like systems on our futures, and whether we can

• co-evolve effective collaborative networks of computers and humans to converge toward “significant singularity,” not as “computers surpassing human intelligence,” but as self-organizing ecosystems of computers and humans, co-evolving toward more effective intelligence.

• develop collaborative problem-solving systems for hard problems, from smart cities to learning, from health to water and ecosystems, problems requiring cross-disciplinary expertise, resolution of conflicting interpretations, data fusion and visualization.

Collaborative intelligence (C-IQ) derives its principles from theory in biology, complex systems, and computer science — principles for next generation search, collaborative problem-solving, and DI fusion (data + interpretation). Each frontier reveals new evidence of the profound coupling
of life and mind. Big questions:

• Design Method. What design method harnesses the collaborative intelligence of humans, toward sustainable futures, tapping principles and dynamics of life-like systems? As humans “re-terraform Earth” what design method can harness our collaborative intelligence as a networked (living, systemic) global mind?

• Life and Cognition, Microbes and Mind. Did some form of cognition define the threshold when the origin of life occurred? Is intelligence a basic defining attribute of life? Is intelligence life-like? How can the origin and evolution of life-like systems, and artificial life systems evolving to become life-like in silico, shed light on intelligence and creativity as emergent phenomena?

•  Research on origins, evolution, and syntheses of life. How did self-organization and evolution give rise to complex, life-like systems and how can these dynamics inform our futures? How can we move beyond the Tragedy of the Commons as a necessary outcome of evolutionary dynamics to evolve toward sustainable futures, channeled by constraints that unleash innovative potential, designing multi-agent, problem-solving systems.

• Deriving the principles and theory of collaborative intelligence. What principles and design method converge toward collaborative intelligence? Are they informed by debates about whether Darwinism fully accounts for how life evolved toward increased functional effectiveness, or whether developmental mechanisms, including signaling and information processing, inform our understanding of how life converts randomness to order as evolution generates effective novelty? 

• New Tools and Smart Systems. How can understanding life-like systems inform design of next generation tools and social networks for collaborative problem-solving, better systems for search and knowledge integration, integrated smart technology, enabling society's global brain to tackle Earth systems scale global problem-solving?