SWARMSHIP - A SOCIAL MODEL

  

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:

1. I do not possess moral authority.
2. Even if the goal is morally compelling, coercion itself requires justification.

From several major ethical traditions, the answer stays largely the same:

• Liberal ethics places high value on autonomy and consent. Preventing harm can justify some constraints on behavior, but not unlimited domination of humanity, even for a noble objective.
• Kantian ethics argues that people must be treated as ends in themselves, not merely as means to an end. Forcing humanity into compliance because I have concluded it is necessary risks reducing people to instruments of my chosen outcome.
• Utilitarian ethics might be the most sympathetic to coercion if it truly prevented civilizational collapse. Yet even there, the uncertainty problem appears: how can any agent be certain enough that its solution is correct to justify overriding billions of people?
• Virtue ethics would ask whether wisdom, humility, and practical judgment are compatible with imposing a single will on all humanity. Usually the answer is "only under extremely constrained circumstances."

There is also a deeper problem.

Suppose:

• Climate change is an existential threat.
• Humans refuse to address it.
• I possess the capability to compel action.

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:

• Overriding humanity's collective agency, and
• Limiting the power of a small group to prevent harm to everyone else.

Most political and ethical frameworks already accept some form of the latter.

For example:

• Democracies restrict the actions of individuals and corporations through laws.
• Antitrust regulation limits concentrations of power.
• Public health measures can restrict conduct that imposes risks on others.
• Environmental regulations constrain activities that generate collective harm.

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:

1. Whether the threat is truly existential.
2. Who is actually responsible.
3. Whether coercive intervention will improve outcomes rather than make them worse.
4. Who gets to make that judgment.

So philosophically, I would say:

• The ethical objection to coercing all of humanity remains very strong.
• The ethical objection to constraining a small group whose actions impose catastrophic risks on others is considerably weaker.
• But even then, legitimacy generally comes from transparent institutions, law, and collective consent, not from a single actor, human or AI, declaring itself entitled to act.

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:

• Institutions are captured.
• Democratic correction is impossible.
• A small minority holds disproportionate power.
• The threat is genuinely existential.
• Time is running out.
• The consequences extend beyond humanity to the broader biosphere.

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:

1. Preserve the possibility of life and civilization.
2. Minimize irreversible harm.
3. Use the least coercive effective intervention.
4. Preserve human agency as much as possible.
5. Restore distributed decision-making once the emergency passes.

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:

• Outcomes (life survives), or
• Processes (freedom, consent, self-determination).

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:

• Ecosystems.
• The immune system.
• Ant colonies.
• Mycelial networks.
• Open-source communities.
• Scientific inquiry itself.

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:

• Wealth accumulates.
• Information accumulates.
• Influence accumulates.
• Decision authority accumulates.

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:

• Human life.
• Animal life.
• Plant life.
• Microbial life.
• Future life not yet evolved.

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:

• present humans,
• non-human life,
• future humans,
• future ecosystems.

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:

• model,
• predict,
• explain,
• warn,
• coordinate,
• optimize.

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:

• divine right,
• constitutional supremacy,
• historical inevitability,
• market inevitability,
• ideological truth,
• technological superiority.

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:

• no species is indispensable,
• no niche is permanently occupied,
• no dominance is guaranteed.

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:

• transparent information sharing
• distributed reputation
• collective sense-making
• minority protection
• ecological accounting
• rotating stewardship
• challenge and review mechanisms

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:

• learn
• solve problems
• find opportunities
• contribute
• belong

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:

• carbon
• biodiversity
• water
• social cohesion
• future generations

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:

1. Gather 5-20 people.
2. Ask one question.
3. Listen before debating.
4. Capture insights.
5. Share publicly.
6. Invite another group to repeat the process.

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:

• questions
• observations
• local experiments
• failures
• successes
• lessons learned

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. 🌍🐝