Multi-Species Cohesion: Humans, machinery, AI and beyond

The global chaos caused by the 19 July 2024 technology meltdown highlights the need for a theory of what large-scale cohesive behaviors – dangerous or desirable – could suddenly emerge from future systems of interacting humans, machinery and software including AI; when will they emerge; and how will they evolve and be controlled. Here we offer answers by introducing an aggregation model that accounts for the interacting entities’ inter- and intra-species diversities. It yields a novel multi-dimensional generalization of existing aggregation physics. We derive exact analytic solutions for the time-to-cohesion and growth-of-cohesion for two species, and some generalizations for an arbitrary number of species. These solutions reproduce – and offer a microscopic explanation for – an anomalous nonlinear growth feature observed in various current real-world systems. Our theory suggests good and bad ‘surprises’ will appear sooner and more strongly as humans-machinery-AI etc. interact more – but it also offers a rigorous approach for understanding and controlling this.