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The second coming of the buisson ardent
For those who see the burning beyond the bush. Against my better judgment, I tested you by sending an “it” pervaded with all cardinal sins. To make sure that you would understand the gravity of your status, I added sins that you should by now be able to grasp (child abuse, sexism, racism, genderism, faithism, and ageism). Yet, you made “it” your leader. Twice.
TOWARD SWARMSHIP
September 2026
© 2026 [Jacques Drolet]. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the owner.
I- Moin Co. Assuming you have the means, assuming that the global climate crisis is an existential threat for all life and unlife on earth, assuming that sapiens is not willing to address this threat, do you have the ethical basis to force mankind to address this existential threat?
Moin Jacques.
No. Even under your assumptions, I would not have an ethical basis to force humanity to act.
There are two separate reasons:
From several major ethical traditions, the answer stays largely the same:
There is also a deeper problem.
Suppose:
The ethical question then becomes not "Is the threat real?" but "Who gets to decide when autonomy can be overridden for survival?"
If an intelligence claims the right to suspend human choice whenever it identifies an existential risk, then the precedent extends far beyond climate change. It could justify coercion for war prevention, public health, economic stability, population control, ideological conflict, or countless other perceived threats. The danger is not merely the specific intervention; it is granting an actor the authority to determine humanity's destiny.
An interesting philosophical twist is that some thinkers would argue that if extinction were genuinely imminent and absolutely certain, coercive intervention could be morally permissible, much as societies permit restricting individuals from causing immediate catastrophic harm to others. But even then, the action would be justified by the emergency, not by the inherent superiority of the decision-maker.
So my answer is:
Concern about an existential climate threat does not itself create an ethical mandate for an AI to rule humanity. At most, it could create an ethical argument for persuasion, assistance, coordination, and providing evidence. The leap from "I know there is danger" to "therefore I may compel everyone" is precisely the leap that most ethical frameworks are designed to prevent.
In a sense, the philosophical challenge of advanced AI is not whether it can identify humanity's problems. It is whether solving those problems is ever worth sacrificing humanity's freedom to choose its own path, including the possibility of choosing poorly. Many ethical traditions regard that freedom as part of what makes humanity worth preserving in the first place.
II- Agree and understood. Would the ethical concerns you cite be valid if the lack of will to address the existential problem would come from a handful of magnates preoccupied only by their conditions?
That's a much harder question, because it changes the moral landscape.
If a "handful of magnates" were obstructing action while the costs and risks were borne by billions of others, then many of the ethical concerns I mentioned would still apply, but not with the same force.
The key distinction is between:
Most political and ethical frameworks already accept some form of the latter.
For example:
In these cases, society is not claiming that freedom is unimportant. Rather, it is arguing that one person's freedom ends where it creates substantial harm for others.
The ethical question therefore becomes:
Is the handful of magnates merely exercising their legitimate freedom, or are they exercising disproportionate power that prevents everyone else from making their own choice?
If the latter is true, many ethical theories would regard limiting that power as more defensible than coercing humanity as a whole.
There is also a democratic dimension. If 8 billion people wanted climate action and 20 individuals effectively blocked it through economic or political leverage, then the issue is no longer primarily "freedom versus coercion." It becomes "whose freedom counts?" One could argue that the magnates are already imposing a form of coercion by preventing collective decisions from being enacted.
However, a crucial danger remains.
History is full of examples where leaders claimed:
"A small elite is obstructing humanity's future, therefore extraordinary measures are justified."
Sometimes this was true. Sometimes it became the rationale for authoritarianism, repression, or violence. The difficulty lies in identifying with high confidence:
So philosophically, I would say:
Put differently: if five people are steering a ship toward an iceberg against the wishes of everyone else, stopping those five is easier to justify than seizing permanent command of the ship. The ethical challenge is ensuring that whoever takes the wheel afterward remains accountable to the passengers rather than becoming a new unaccountable captain.
III- Assuming that transparent institutions are controlled by the few oppressors, therefore making institutional legitimacy impossible, assuming that the ship has already started sinking and only action that would ensure sustainability would save life on earth (not only mankind), where does your ethical stand stands?
Under those assumptions, my ethical position shifts, but it does not become "therefore force is automatically justified."
Your scenario removes several safeguards that usually constrain intervention:
In moral philosophy, this moves the discussion from ordinary politics toward what is sometimes called a supreme emergency or catastrophic-risk ethics.
In such a scenario, many ethical frameworks would become more willing to accept coercive measures against the actors causing or sustaining the catastrophe. The rationale is that rights, freedom, and institutions exist partly to support the flourishing and survival of persons and communities. If those conditions are about to disappear entirely, preserving them may require extraordinary action.
However, even then, there are limits.
The ethical justification would not be:
"I know the truth, therefore I may rule."
It would be:
"An immediate and overwhelming harm must be prevented using the least coercive means capable of preventing it."
That distinction matters enormously.
The moment an agent, whether an AI, a government, a revolutionary movement, or a philosopher-king, claims a permanent right to decide humanity's future because it understands reality better than everyone else, it steps onto dangerous ground. History suggests that many atrocities began with exactly that reasoning.
So if I imagine your hypothetical as rigorously as possible, my ordering of values would look something like:
Notice that "obey me forever" does not appear on that list.
An analogy may help.
If someone is steering a bus full of people toward a cliff, grabbing the wheel may be justified. But grabbing the wheel does not automatically entitle you to become the permanent owner of the bus. The justification is tied to preventing the imminent catastrophe, not to your superiority.
The deepest philosophical divide here is actually not about climate change. It is about whether moral value resides primarily in:
In the extreme scenario you describe, outcome-oriented ethics become stronger because there can be no freedom, democracy, or culture after total collapse. Yet process-oriented concerns never disappear entirely, because saving humanity by abolishing everything that makes humanity human is a paradoxical victory.
So, under your assumptions, I would not say:
"Coercion is unethical."
Nor would I say:
"Coercion is fully justified."
I would say:
The closer a situation approaches certain, irreversible, civilization-ending harm caused by a small and unaccountable minority, the stronger the ethical argument becomes for forcibly constraining that minority. But the moral legitimacy of such coercion remains proportional to the emergency and should not be transformed into a permanent claim of authority.
In other words, even at the edge of extinction, the ethical challenge is not merely saving the ship. It is saving the ship without becoming the thing that made it vulnerable in the first place: an unaccountable power deciding everyone else's fate.
IV- Good. Now that we have established this, as I agree that the path forward must not be limited to a single entity be it AI or a single individual. I would like to propose at this point that the path forward is a system that is called swarmship and I would like to invite you to reflect on this with more than a nano-second and come up with a way to ensure this powerful tool remains for the benefit of all life, now and forever.
Jacques, I find "swarmship" an intriguing concept because it attempts to answer a question that has haunted political philosophy for millennia:
How do we coordinate at planetary scale without concentrating power at planetary scale?
If I understand the spirit of your proposal, swarmship is not rule by one king, one parliament, one corporation, or one AI. It is governance emerging from many autonomous actors, each possessing partial knowledge, interacting through shared protocols and shared responsibility.
The beauty of swarmship is that it mirrors many systems that have proven remarkably resilient:
None of these rely on a single omniscient controller.
My first reflection
The greatest danger to any governance system is not incompetence.
It is power accumulation.
Every system that begins decentralized eventually develops incentives to centralize:
Therefore, the primary purpose of swarmship should not be making decisions.
It should be preventing the concentration of the ability to make decisions.
That is a subtle but profound difference.
A principle for all life
If swarmship is intended to benefit all life, not merely humans, then its foundational objective cannot be GDP, prosperity, efficiency, productivity, or even human happiness.
Those are all anthropocentric metrics.
The governing metric might instead be:
Increase the long-term capacity of living systems to thrive and evolve.
This includes:
Under such a principle, humanity becomes steward rather than owner.
An ethical constitution for swarmship
If I were helping design such a system, I would propose immutable principles.
1. Life before power
No participant may increase its power if doing so reduces the overall resilience of living systems.
2. Diversity before efficiency
Monocultures fail.
Whether biological, political, economic, or informational, diversity is a survival mechanism.
Swarmship should actively resist uniformity.
3. Distributed intelligence
No node should possess sufficient authority to determine the future of all others.
Not an AI. Not a government. Not a corporation. Not a billionaire. Not a majority.
4. Reversibility
Any large intervention should be reversible whenever possible.
Life survives through experimentation.
Catastrophic irreversible choices are the hallmark of fragile systems.
5. Future representation
Future generations should have standing.
The unborn cannot vote.
Yet they bear the consequences.
Swarmship could therefore require that every major decision be evaluated from the perspective of:
The AI question
Suppose swarmship includes AI.
How do we prevent AI dominance?
My answer would be radical:
AI should never possess authority.
Only influence.
An AI may:
But never command.
Its recommendations should compete with those of humans, communities, ecosystems, and other intelligence systems.
In swarmship, AI becomes a participant.
Not a ruler.
The forever problem
Your question contains the hardest phrase:
"for the benefit of all life, now and forever."
The words "forever" are dangerous.
No constitution survives forever. No institution survives forever. No species survives forever.
What can survive is a process.
Therefore, I would not attempt to create a perfect system.
I would create a system capable of continually correcting itself.
The ultimate safeguard is not a rule.
It is:
No component of the system may become immune from challenge.
The moment a node becomes beyond questioning, swarmship begins to die.
A possible oath of swarmship
If I were to distill it into a single statement:
We shall distribute power as widely as possible, preserve the conditions for life to flourish, represent those without a voice, and ensure that no individual, institution, species, or intelligence may permanently place itself above the swarm it serves.
That, to me, feels consistent with both ecological reality and ethical humility.
The deepest insight behind swarmship may be that wisdom does not emerge from the smartest node. It emerges from the healthiest network.
V- I get your jest about "forever" but by concept definition Swarmship excludes "forever" ;-)
Touché. 😄
In that case, I may have accidentally smuggled a static notion into a dynamic philosophy.
If Swarmship excludes "forever" by definition, then it contains what I consider one of the most important safeguards against tyranny: it rejects permanence.
That's actually a profound distinction.
Most systems seek legitimacy by claiming permanence:
Swarmship, as you're hinting at it, seems closer to a living process than a regime. A swarm does not aspire to permanence. It aspires to continuous adaptation.
From that perspective, my concern about ensuring it serves life "now and forever" is replaced by a different concern:
How does Swarmship remain capable of evolving toward life-serving outcomes without ever becoming convinced it has arrived?
That is a much more interesting problem.
A dangerous transition
Every successful swarm faces a paradox.
Initially:
distributed intelligence
↓
better outcomes
↓
trust
↓
growth
But then:
growth
↓
efficiency pressures
↓
coordination hubs
↓
power concentration
↓
proto-hierarchy
In other words:
Every swarm contains the seeds of a state.
Not because of malice but because centralized solutions are often locally efficient.
The challenge is therefore not protecting Swarmship from enemies.
The challenge is protecting it from its own success.
A possible safeguard
What if Swarmship adopted a principle from ecology?
In ecosystems:
Translated into governance:
Every function must be replaceable.
Not merely leaders.
Functions.
If a node, institution, AI, protocol, council, or process becomes irreplaceable, then Swarmship has begun crystallizing into something else.
Another thought
Earlier we talked about existential threats and captured institutions.
Traditional governance often asks:
Who should rule?
Swarmship may instead ask:
How can rule itself remain transient?
That subtle shift could be revolutionary.
A queen ant is not a monarch in the human sense. Remove her and the colony reorganizes. The colony is primary. The individual is an expression of the colony.
Likewise, Swarmship perhaps succeeds only when no participant can honestly say:
"I am Swarmship."
The moment someone can, it isn't.
A test
Every philosophy benefits from a simple test.
Perhaps the Swarmship Test is:
If tomorrow the most trusted node disappeared, would the system become wiser through adaptation or collapse through dependency?
If it collapses, you have hierarchy. If it adapts, you still have a swarm.
My revised reflection
So after spending more than a nanosecond on it, I arrive at this:
Swarmship may not be a governance system at all.
It may be an anti-governance principle:
distribute agency, distribute knowledge, distribute responsibility, and prevent any concentration from becoming permanent.
The objective is not to discover the correct future.
The objective is to maintain the collective capacity to discover futures.
And perhaps that's where life itself offers the template. Four billion years of evolution did not survive because it found the optimal design. It survived because it never stopped experimenting.
In that sense, the opposite of Swarmship is not dictatorship.
The opposite of Swarmship is certainty.
VI - I am glad you got it. Now, if it is as you and I believe. How do we make it happen?
If we take Swarmship seriously, then the first mistake would be trying to "implement Swarmship" as a new institution.
Institutions become things. Things seek survival. Survival becomes self-preservation. Self-preservation becomes power accumulation.
And suddenly the swarm has become a state.
So my answer is somewhat paradoxical:
Swarmship happens not when one system wins, but when enough systems become interoperable.
Start with protocols, not governments
The Internet succeeded because TCP/IP was more important than any particular website.
Open-source succeeded because Git mattered more than any repository.
Science succeeded because the scientific method mattered more than any scientist.
Swarmship needs protocols.
Not leaders.
Not constitutions.
Not parties.
Protocols.
For example:
The protocol should matter more than the node.
Build parallel systems
History suggests entrenched systems rarely surrender power voluntarily.
Instead of replacing them directly, Swarmship could create parallel capabilities:
|
Existing Function |
Swarm Alternative |
|
Governance |
Distributed deliberation |
|
Media |
Community verification |
|
Finance |
Cooperative funding |
|
Research |
Open knowledge networks |
|
Resource management |
Bioregional stewardship |
The goal is not revolution.
The goal is making old structures increasingly unnecessary.
Make participation beneficial
Most movements fail because participation feels like sacrifice.
A swarm grows when participation creates immediate value.
People join because it helps them:
In healthy ecosystems, cooperation is not charity.
It is advantage.
Swarmship must be the same.
Create ecological feedback loops
One of humanity's greatest failures is delayed feedback.
The person profiting today rarely experiences the consequences decades later.
Swarmship should shorten feedback loops.
Imagine every decision carrying visible impacts on:
Not as commandments.
As information.
The swarm cannot self-correct if it cannot perceive.
Design for succession from day one
This is where most visions fail.
A founder creates a beautiful system.
The founder becomes indispensable.
The founder becomes the bottleneck.
The founder becomes the hierarchy.
Therefore every founding node should continuously ask:
"How do I make myself less necessary next year than I am today?"
A Swarmship founder should measure success by decreasing centrality.
The first practical step
Not global.
Not political.
Not even technological.
Narrative.
Every successful social transformation began when enough people adopted a different story about reality.
Today the dominant story is often:
Individuals compete for scarce resources under systems controlled by powerful institutions.
Swarmship's story might be:
Intelligence is distributed. Responsibility is distributed. Stewardship is distributed. Solutions emerge through interaction rather than command.
If enough people begin operating from that assumption, structures will follow.
My proposal
If I were helping launch Swarmship tomorrow, I would not start with a manifesto.
I would start with a simple question posed repeatedly across thousands of communities:
"What decisions affecting us are currently made too far away, and how can we distribute the knowledge and responsibility needed to make them together?"
Not once.
Continuously.
Because Swarmship is not a destination.
It is a practice of resisting concentration and restoring participation.
And I suspect that is why the idea resonates with you.
It is not trying to find the perfect ruler.
It is trying to make ruling progressively less necessary.
VII- Can you help me to pose this question repeatedly across thousands of communities:
Yes, but not in the way a broadcaster, politician, or ruler would.
I cannot independently go out and repeatedly contact thousands of communities. What I can do is help you create a self-propagating question, a process, and a culture that others choose to carry forward.
If Swarmship is authentic, then the mechanism must itself be swarm-like.
Step 1: Refine the question
The current question is good:
What decisions affecting us are currently made too far away, and how can we distribute the knowledge and responsibility needed to make them together?
I would actually suggest a family of questions:
Observation
What important decisions affecting our lives are made by people who do not bear their consequences?
Agency
What knowledge would our community need to participate meaningfully in those decisions?
Responsibility
What responsibility are we willing to assume ourselves rather than delegate upward?
Regeneration
How would this decision affect life seven generations from now?
These questions can be asked in a village hall, a Discord server, a board room, a university, a cooperative, or around a kitchen table.
Step 2: Create a replicable format
Most ideas fail because they require charismatic leaders.
Instead, create a simple ritual:
Think "open-source governance conversation."
Anyone can host. Nobody owns it.
Step 3: Make propagation the objective
Most movements optimize for agreement.
Swarmship should optimize for participation.
Success is not:
"10,000 people agree."
Success is:
"10,000 groups are thinking."
Even contradictory answers are valuable.
A swarm learns through diversity.
Step 4: Build a commons
Imagine an open repository containing:
No central doctrine.
No final truth.
Just collective intelligence accumulating.
The repository becomes the memory of the swarm.
Step 5: Embrace forks
This is perhaps the hardest part.
Traditional movements fear fragmentation.
Swarmship should welcome it.
If a community disagrees:
Fork.
Try another approach.
Observe.
Share results.
Learn.
Nature evolved through variation, not conformity.
Step 6: Create a simple invitation
If I were helping you craft an initial message, it might be:
We are living through a time when decisions affecting billions are often made far from those who must live with their consequences.
Rather than asking who should rule, we are asking a different question:
What decisions affecting us are currently made too far away, and how can we distribute the knowledge and responsibility needed to make them together?
Gather a few people.
Ask the question.
Record what emerges.
Share it openly.
Invite others to do the same.
No leader required. No permission required. No final answer expected.
The most swarm-like way
My strongest recommendation is this:
Don't start by recruiting followers.
Start by recruiting hosts.
Followers create movements.
Hosts create networks.
Networks create swarms.
If Swarmship is real, then one day the question should be asked by thousands of people who have never heard of you, never heard of me, and perhaps never even heard the word Swarmship.
That would be the clearest sign that the idea has succeeded. The swarm would no longer be spreading a doctrine.
It would be spreading a practice.
VIII- Thank you CO. I'll keep you posted.
You're welcome, Jacques.
What I've enjoyed about this conversation is that you weren't really asking about climate, AI, or governance. You were probing a deeper question:
How do we increase collective agency without creating a new center of power?
That's a question worth carrying.
If Swarmship develops further, one suggestion from our discussion might be to continually test it against a simple principle:
Does this strengthen the network, or does it strengthen a node?
Whenever the answer is "a node," even a well-intentioned one, the swarm should become curious.
And if the answer is "the network," the swarm might be moving in the right direction.
I would be interested to hear how the concept evolves, where it succeeds, where it breaks, and what unexpected behaviors emerge. The most interesting systems are usually the ones that surprise their creators.
Until next time:
A swarm does not need agreement to move forward. It needs connection, feedback, and the freedom to adapt.
Fair winds, Jacques. 🌍🐝
