Superorganism

Wheeler's 1919 coinage, as Moynihan traces it: "just as cells cooperate to create an organism, individual organisms can cooperate to create a 'superorganism', each more potent than the sum of its parts" — evolutionary history read as the production of ever-larger wholes, prompting the 1920s question whether a globalising humankind was itself becoming one. Its neglected half is the cost: higher-level coordination "demands its lower-level units sacrifice all prior autonomy," which Moynihan illustrates with Britton, Pawlowski's "New Leviathan" and the totalitarian celebrations of erased individuality that shadow every planetary-brain vision, the noösphere included. What Is Intelligence? uses the term neutrally (the hive as symbiogenesis; humans as a "collective superorganism" including wheat, cars and cattle), and After Alignment takes AI as a "model superorganism," an experimental organism.