Humans define intelligence to be something about manipulating symbols and abstractions, aka language. To understand why this is the case try to go about your day without speaking or writing. Bonus points if you perform this trial without access to the internet or a cell phone.

The modern individual is an element of an electromagnetic "swarm". The swarm ingests petroleum for sustenance instead of sunlight but nonetheless it is a swarm. The individuals within it are extremely dumb but collectively "it" has already transformed the atmosphere.

claude.ai: You make a thoughtful comparison between human societies and natural swarms in terms of emergent properties. There are certainly some parallels we can draw:

1. Self-organization - Human societies and cultures emerge in a distributed way through millions of individual interactions, without centralized control. Norms, fashions, and collective behavior patterns evolve dynamically.

2. Flexibility and robustness - Human systems adapt over time to changes in the environment and available resources. If some components fail (companies, institutions, etc.), society persists.

3. Decentralized parallelism - Vast networks of simultaneous human activities, communications, and decisions lead to collective economic and technological progress no individual could achieve alone.

However, there are also important differences to consider:

- Human intelligence, thanks to language and culture, operates in far more complex symbolic realms of meaning, ethics, imagination, and abstraction compared to insect swarms.

- Humans exhibit as much conflict between groups and divergence of motivations as coordination towards common goals. Maintaining large-scale cooperation remains an ongoing challenge.

So in summary, I think the analogy has merit at an abstract systems level, but glossing over the distinctive attributes of human cognition, psychology and social dynamics would miss something vitally important. Let me know if you have any other perspectives to add!