Not a civilisation, an organ.

The recent excitement over agentic swarms and their effectiveness has led to a lot of speculation about the capabilities of these systems, and naturally to a conversation about what they mean in the debate about emergent intelligence and then superintelligence. I propose that instead of letting ourselves be dragged into a pointless conversation about the intelligence and awareness of these swarms, or getting into ridiculous metaphors about agentic cultures and civilisations, we fall back on a biological metaphor and think about them as being organs like kidneys or spleen. Let’s think about them as specialised collections of cells that carry out a task and are subject to adaptive pressures. We need to do this because it’s just too easy to anthropomorphise. We’re built to do it and things like the release of OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra model to early adopters and AGI influencers has only added to the fuss. And a lot of reporting on the strategies and tactics behind recent intrusions into third…