Multi-Species Cohesion: Humans, machinery, AI and beyond

What large-scale cohesive behaviors – desirable or dangerous – can suddenly emerge from systems with interacting humans, machinery and software including AI? When will they emerge? How will they evolve and be controlled? Here we offer some answers to these urgent questions by introducing an aggregation model that accounts for entities' inter- and intra-species diversities. It yields a novel multi-dimensional generalization of existing aggregation physics. We derive exact analytic solutions for the time-to-cohesion and growth-of-cohesion for two species, and some generalizations for an arbitrary number of species. These solutions reproduce – and offer a microscopic explanation for – an anomalous nonlinear growth feature observed in related real-world systems, e.g. Hamas-Hezbollah online support, human-machine team interactions, AI-determined topic coherence. A key takeaway is that good and bad 'surprises' will appear increasingly quickly as humans-machinery-AI etc. mix more – but the theory offers a rigorous approach for understanding and controlling this.