Military contexts, perhaps because they have long struggled with the need for distributed authority and responsiveness, abound with examples of heuristics. Napoleon, for example, told his armies to ‘march to the sound of the guns’ instead of waiting for orders. Another example: when the battle plan falls apart – capture the high ground, stay in tou

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First, we needed coordinated operations, something that necessitated emergent, adaptive intelligence. Shared consciousness achieved this, but it was only the first half. As we would soon find, keeping pace with the speed of our environment and enemy would require something else as well: decentralized control. Creating it would be just as taxing, ra

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