This is another response from Matt Crosslin to George Siemens on AI. I came across it in OLDaily. Downes notes first the comparison of companies, governments, etc. as a sort of intelligent system. But that if you remove all the people, the company, government, or social system ceases to function (much like a Mechanical Turk) – I keep coming back to Soylent Green is People! this year.
It was this bit that gave me some pause in Downes’ commentary though:
I had to read that a few times, because I thought it odd to say we haven’t seen naturally occurring things throughout history. As I made breakfast I thought about a recent session on complexity I was part of and how one of the elements discussed was self-organization. The term itself usually refers to phenomena in natural sciences (think about crystalline structures) while in the social sciences it’s referred to as spontaneous order. When individuals act in accordance to their own goals, patterns may emerge. These patterns are, “the result of human action but not of human design” (Friedrich, H. 1969).
So I came back here and read the Downes article again and see he specifically pointed to organizations or institutions not being spontaneous. Maybe that is somewhat true in a sense, but spontaneous order certainly influences organizations and institutions. In Canada we inherited common law from Britain, but common law itself developed over centuries of human action and interaction before being codified and integrated into our legal systems today.
While I agree with Crosslin that AGI is not coming “very soon”* I do see a place for GenAI in connectivism. Although I’m not an expert in the theory as the three others mentioned here are, my understanding is that nodes in connectivism don’t have to be people. A node might be a piece of media (I can learn from a book and share that with my network). GenAI would be a node. This was the first time I recall seeing the note about “currency” being accurate and up-to-date knowledge. But thinking about 2008 the information system(s) and focus were very different than today in 2025.
Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash
*I mean, I’m still waiting for Thomas Edison’s century old claim that video will soon completely supplant books. Ed Zitron’s reporting on AI is required if you are looking for a take on the sector that doesn’t involve someone whose job it is to raise funding.