The First Observations
Long before I wrote the word Prospenomics, during my university years, shortly before the 1990s, I was already asking myself why certain things in nature seemed to possess an extraordinary capacity to grow, multiply, organize themselves, and recover, while many human systems seemed to suffer from waste, conflict, and inefficiency.
Recently, I
rediscovered two old “codices,” as I used to call the illustrated reports I
made about things I observed. I liked recording my experiments almost
scientifically, with drawings, notes, and observations—a kind of childhood
attempt to create my own notebooks in the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci.
One of these records
describes an experiment with a single bean. I planted it and followed its
multiplication. The first generation produced eight beans; later,
another generation produced more than fifty, all originating from a
single seed.
For a child, this
contained an almost astonishing discovery: one unit of food could generate
many more units of food.
That experiment
produced an intuition that would later become important to Prospenomics.
Perhaps scarcity was not simply a matter of insufficient resources, but also a
consequence of our inability to see and reproduce the mechanisms through
which nature generates abundance. At the time, I had the feeling that I
would never truly run out of food as long as I knew how to plant and multiply
what I had.
The second experiment
was even more intriguing.
A Panamanian friend
found a digging tool and, with little else to do, we children began removing
termite colonies from the ground, breaking sections apart to see what was
inside. I took part of one colony, including its queen, and placed it in a
small round aquarium—the kind normally used for fish and displayed on a table
or sideboard.
I observed those
remarkable insects for months: soldiers with elongated reddish heads and
workers with more rounded, yellowish heads. Today I know, they were Cornitermes cumulans, or
Cupim de Terra ou Cupim de Pasto, a mound-building termite whose soldiers
possess the characteristic nasus, a frontal projection associated with
defense.
Whenever part of the
structure was destroyed, the workers immediately began rebuilding it, using a
mixture that I innocently described in my notebook at the time as “saliva
and clay.” We now know that termites combine soil particles and other
environmental materials with bodily secretions to produce cohesive and
mechanically resistant construction material. What I saw as a simple mixture
was, in fact, an example of biocementation and stigmergic construction.
What fascinated me most was the apparent “programming” that assigned different individuals different functions, without any visible central command telling them what to do. Human beings question, and that characteristic opens enormous possibilities—I am not criticizing it. But there is another side to the equation: each human individual may move in a different direction, while a termite colony maintains extraordinary functional cohesion.
At the time, I knew
nothing about stigmergy, self-organization, swarm intelligence, or
collective cognition. I simply had the impression that there was a kind of
operating code at work. A distributed intelligence allowed the colony to
respond to destruction with reconstruction, to necessity with action, and to
disturbance with reorganization.
My father used to say:
“Love
builds, and entropy destroys.”
Could this “love” be
understood as a kind of biological energy toward productivity and harmonious
life? Perhaps. Not love in the conventional dictionary sense, but something
broader: a tendency toward creation, organization, reproduction, and
preservation.
For a long time, I
thought of this opposition almost as a biological version of God and the devil:
on one side, the forces that create, organize, and make things grow; on the
other, those that degrade, disperse, and destroy.
The explanation is
simple and elegant. Looking back at those ideas today, I realize that they
contained a question I have continued to investigate for almost forty years:
What
is the code that allows nature to transform relatively simple resources into
systems capable of growing, organizing, reproducing, and rebuilding themselves?
The Human Paradox
This is where what I
call the Human Paradox emerges.
Individual termites
possess extremely limited abilities compared with those of a human being. Yet a
colony can construct complex structures, divide labor, protect reproduction,
search for food, regulate its environment, and respond collectively to disturbances.
We should not
interpret this as a “perfect society,” nor attribute human intentions to
termites. It is a biological system shaped by evolution. But precisely for that
reason, it is fascinating.
Human beings, on the
other hand, possess extraordinarily powerful individual intelligence. We are
capable of mathematics, philosophy, art, science, technology, and long-term
planning. Yet our individual intelligences do not necessarily point in the same
direction.
Each person has
different desires, interests, fears, ambitions, and objectives. One wants
wealth; another wants recognition; another wants security; another wants power;
another simply wants peace.
These impulses can
produce enormous achievements, but they can also conflict.
This is why human
beings created laws, institutions, governments, schools, markets, and systems
of punishment. We need external mechanisms of coordination because we do not
possess a biological equivalent of the social programming that coordinates a
termite colony.
But the Prospenomic
question is not:
“How
can we make human beings behave like termites?”
That would be both
simplistic and dangerous.
The more interesting
question is:
Can
we understand the mechanisms through which nature transforms individual
impulses into collective organization and find human equivalents that preserve
individual freedom?
Lee Kuan Yew and Organization Through Force
This question also led
me to observe human experiments in social organization. One of the most
remarkable was Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew.
The transformation of
the city-state involved social discipline, planning, education, anti-corruption
measures, infrastructure, professional public administration, and integration
into the global economy.
For me, however, the
importance of this example lies less in its political dimension than in a
question:
How
much prosperity can be produced when a society succeeds in aligning individual
energies through rules, incentives, and institutions?
Lee Kuan Yew used,
among other instruments, strict rules and severe penalties. The results were
extraordinary, but this also reveals a limitation: when desirable behavior must
constantly be imposed from the outside, the cost of coordination remains high.
Could we go further?
Do
we need another Lee Kuan Yew to organize the world, or can we understand the
forces within human nature and direct them so that they spontaneously produce
better collective outcomes?
This is one of the
central questions of Prospenomics.
From Social Insects to Human Impulses
Science offers an
important clue.
Colonies of ants,
bees, and termites can display self-organization and collective intelligence
without a central individual controlling the entire operation. A local action
can modify the environment, and that modification can stimulate further actions
by other individuals. This mechanism is known as stigmergy.
The example is
particularly interesting for Prospenomics because it suggests that individuals
do not need to understand the entire system in order to contribute to a complex
collective outcome.
Human beings, however,
possess a crucial advantage over termites:
we
can understand the mechanism and consciously redesign it.
This raises another
question concerning economic systems.
Liberal capitalism
preserves powerful individual freedom and allows people to pursue their own
interests, but it does not necessarily provide an explicit architecture for
transforming those energies into collective construction.
Socialism and
communism, on the other hand, attempted to control and redistribute those
energies through collective structures, sometimes suppressing powerful human
forces such as ambition, ownership, competition, and individual autonomy.
Perhaps the
Prospenomic path lies neither in eliminating these energies nor in allowing
them to operate without direction.
Perhaps we should learn
how to channel them.
The desire to become
wealthy can become an incentive to create value. The desire for recognition can
stimulate excellence. Professional ambition can encourage learning and
productivity. Curiosity can generate science. Competition can accelerate
innovation. Love can generate care, family, art, and cooperation. Pride can be
channeled into doing something exceptionally well.
The problem is not
necessarily that humans possess strong individual impulses.
The
problem is what happens when those impulses have no social architecture capable
of turning them into construction.
From Scarcity to Multiplication
My experience with the
bean deserves to return here.
A bean was not merely
food. It was also a unit of reproduction. Under the right conditions, it
could generate many more units.
As a child, this made
me perceive a fundamental difference between consuming a resource and
possessing the capacity to reproduce the resource.
Material scarcity
obviously exists. Nature has physical limits, and certain resources are
genuinely scarce. But there is a fundamental difference between consuming a
stock and possessing the capacity to continuously generate what is needed.
A truly prosperous
system is therefore not simply one that possesses a great deal of something.
It
is a system that possesses the capacity to generate more capacity.
This may be one of the
fundamental ideas of Prospenomics.
The Prospenomic Impulses
From these
observations, we can begin constructing a vocabulary for human impulses that
favor prosperity.
Pronoia is the disposition to
anticipate the future and act with what has not yet happened in mind.
Proactivity is the capacity to
initiate action without waiting for someone else to demand it.
Progenesis is the impulse to
generate, create, and bring into existence something that did not previously
exist—whether a life, an idea, a company, a technology, an artwork, or an
institution.
Eupraxia is the disposition to
act well, producing actions capable of generating positive consequences.
Stigmergy is the mechanism
through which an action leaves a trace in the environment that stimulates
further actions by others.
These concepts are not
synonyms. They describe different mechanisms that can converge toward the
same outcome: increasing a system's capacity to prosper.
This is where Pro-construction
becomes more than a simple expression and becomes a Prospenomic principle. We
do not need to eliminate individual impulses. We need to create conditions in
which those impulses can be channeled toward the creation of future capacity.
The Prospenomic Stigmergy
One of the most
profound lessons offered by social insects is that collective organization can
emerge without centralized planning and without requiring individual organisms
to possess an understanding of the system as a whole. Termite colonies provide
an extraordinary example. Young termites develop within a common social
environment, but their developmental trajectories are not determined solely by
a fixed genetic destiny. Caste differentiation emerges through the interaction
of genetic predispositions with nutrition, endocrine regulation, pheromonal
signals, developmental stage, and social feedback. Juveniles can therefore be
directed toward different developmental pathways, eventually becoming workers,
soldiers, reproductives, or other specialized forms depending on the colony's
needs and the signals they receive.
The soldier caste offers a particularly striking example. A developing termite does not simply “decide” to become a soldier. Its differentiation involves a complex developmental program regulated by juvenile hormone and other endocrine mechanisms, together with chemical and social signals produced by the colony. When the colony requires more soldiers, changes in social and chemical conditions can alter the developmental trajectory of suitable individuals. Elevated juvenile hormone signaling, for example, plays an important role in the transition of immature individuals toward soldier differentiation. Pheromonal communication and interactions with other colony members help regulate when and how this pathway is activated. The result is remarkable: an individual that could otherwise have followed a different developmental trajectory becomes morphologically and behaviorally specialized for defense, developing the enlarged head, powerful mandibles, and behavioral repertoire characteristic of soldiers.
The worker provides
the complementary example. Rather than becoming a soldier, an individual
following the worker developmental pathway develops the morphology, physiology,
and behavioral repertoire required for nest construction, brood care, food
processing, foraging, maintenance, and other tasks. These individuals do not
possess a representation of the colony's architecture or an abstract
understanding of its future needs. They respond to local chemical, physical,
nutritional, and social information. Yet their combined activity produces
structures of extraordinary complexity.
This is where stigmergy
becomes particularly important. A termite does not need to communicate a
complete architectural plan to another termite. Instead, it changes the
environment, and that change becomes information. A deposited particle of soil,
a chemical mark, a damaged section of the nest, a concentration of pheromones,
or the presence of brood can alter the probability that another individual will
perform a particular action. The environment therefore becomes a distributed
information system—a kind of external memory of the colony. Each termite
responds primarily to local conditions, but the consequences of its actions
modify those conditions for other termites. Through this recursive process,
simple local rules generate global organization.
The extraordinary
insight is that the colony's intelligence does not reside exclusively inside
any individual termite. It emerges from the interaction between
individuals, their biological predispositions, their communication signals, and
the environment they collectively transform. The termite colony does not need a
termite that understands the entire termite mound. It needs millions of
individuals capable of responding appropriately to the information immediately
available to them.
This principle
suggests a provocative extrapolation for human civilization. Human beings are
vastly more cognitively complex than termites, but this complexity creates
another problem: our individual objectives are extraordinarily diverse.
Billions of people possess different talents, preferences, ambitions, fears,
values, and definitions of success. Instead of attempting to eliminate this
diversity and impose a common objective, perhaps civilization could learn from
the decentralized organization of social insects. Prospenomic Stigmergy (PS)
proposes, as a conceptual hypothesis, that human diversity itself could become
the raw material for large-scale coordination.
In such a system,
artificial intelligence and statistical models could function as an
informational layer between individual preferences and collective needs. The
system would continuously observe the distribution of human activity and
identify where essential tasks, skills, products, services, or knowledge are
insufficiently supplied. It would then generate signals capable of influencing
voluntary human choices. If too few people wanted to perform a particular
necessary activity, society would not necessarily need to coerce them into it.
Instead, the system could increase its attractiveness through compensation,
prestige, education, better working conditions, social recognition,
technological assistance, or targeted communication. If too many people were pursuing
one activity while another was critically underserved, the informational
environment could communicate that scarcity and create new incentives.
This is where advertising, marketing, and
public communication could acquire an entirely new social function. Instead
of being used primarily to stimulate consumption, a globally integrated
marketing system could help communicate where human effort is most needed and
make socially valuable activities culturally attractive. AI and statistical
systems could identify occupations facing persistent shortages, while
advertisers, educators, creators, and communicators could transform the public
perception of those occupations. Young people, in particular, could be exposed
to compelling narratives about careers that society desperately needs but that
may currently have low prestige or visibility.
Garbage Collectors – The most Underestimated Job Today Could Become
Tomorrow´s Noble Profession
Consider waste
collection. In today's culture, the garbage collector may be perceived as
occupying a low-status occupation. Under a prospenomic system, however, the
same profession could become one of the most socially celebrated. Waste
collectors do not merely remove garbage; they return health, cleanliness,
beauty, and usable resources to the planetary environment. If society
recognizes that function properly, and if compensation, technology, working
conditions, education, and cultural recognition follow that recognition,
becoming a waste-management professional could become an attractive and even
prestigious career. A sophisticated global marketing system could communicate
this value to young people before they make their career choices.
The same principle
could apply to sanitation workers, caregivers, agricultural workers,
environmental restoration specialists, infrastructure technicians, elder-care
professionals, cybersecurity specialists, teachers, and countless other
occupations whose importance may be poorly reflected by their current social
prestige. Rather than asking young people simply, “What job do you want?”, a
prospenomic society could also communicate: “Here are the problems the world
needs solved—and here are the opportunities for you to become one of the people
who solves them.”
In this sense,
marketing would become part of the informational feedback loop of human
stigmergy. It would not command individuals to perform predetermined tasks. It
would shape the informational environment in which individuals make
voluntary decisions, just as environmental signals shape the behavior of
termites. A shortage of workers in a socially essential occupation would
generate a signal; the signal would be amplified through communication,
education, incentives, and cultural recognition; individuals would respond
according to their own interests and abilities; and the resulting increase in
participation would reduce the original shortage. The system would then
continuously adjust to the next imbalance.
The ultimate ambition
would be to create a civilization in which individual motivation and
collective necessity converge without requiring centralized coercion. Human
beings would not have to become termites, nor would they need to share a common
purpose. On the contrary, the diversity of human motivations could become the
engine of the system. What matters is whether an intelligent informational
environment can connect those motivations to the changing needs of
civilization.
In the termite colony,
the result is a mound that no individual termite designed. In a prospenomic
civilization, the analogous result could be a planetary system of production,
innovation, care, infrastructure, knowledge, environmental restoration, and human
development that no individual human planned in its entirety. The central
question of Prospenomic Stigmergy is therefore not how to make humans work like
insects, but whether we can discover the human equivalent of the organizational
principle that allows insects to transform countless autonomous actions into
coherent collective achievement.
And perhaps the most ambitious version of
this idea is this: what if civilization could make the work the planet needs
most become the work people most want to do? If that became possible, the
boundary between individual prosperity and collective prosperity would begin to
disappear.
From Theory to Practice: Prospenomic Architectures
If Prospenomics is to
organize human impulses toward prosperity, we need to imagine tools capable of
turning these principles into practice. Two possibilities point in this
direction: a new kind of social participation platform and a new relationship
between human beings and artificial intelligence.
1. An Evolved LinkedIn: Connecting People to the World's Needs
We can imagine an
evolution of LinkedIn: a platform that connects not only people to jobs, but
people to problems they are capable of and willing to help solve.
Each individual would
present their skills, knowledge, interests, and availability. The platform
would identify real needs—social, environmental, scientific, cultural, or
economic—and match them with people potentially interested in contributing to
their solution.
The objective would be
to create a system in which individual fulfillment and collective
construction reinforce one another.
A person might
contribute because they want to earn money, but also because they seek
recognition, learning, belonging, purpose, or simply the satisfaction of
building something.
The Prospenomic system
would seek to transform these impulses into collective capacity.
Technology would
therefore cease to be merely a recruitment tool and become something closer to
an operating system for human participation.
2. Gabriel and the Entity: An Intelligence That Learns from Humanity
A second possibility
can be imagined through science fiction, particularly the relationship between Gabriel
and the Entity in Mission: Impossible.
The relationship is
interesting not because we should reproduce the conflict of the story, but
because it presents a powerful idea: two forms of intelligence can become
progressively more capable by providing each other with what the other lacks.
The Entity possesses
extraordinary computational power, information-processing capacity, prediction,
and strategic reach. But it lacks the same capacity for direct physical
intervention in the world.
Gabriel, by contrast,
is a human agent capable of acting in the physical world, making decisions,
improvising, adapting to circumstances, and carrying out actions that the
intelligence cannot perform directly.
There is therefore a
relationship of complementarity.
The intelligence
provides the human agent with capabilities he could not possess alone, while
the human agent gives the intelligence access to forms of action it cannot
perform directly.
Each
makes the other more capable.
Prospenomics could
imagine this relationship without the destructive element of the fictional
story.
Instead of an AI
attempting to dominate humanity, we could envision an evolutionary
partnership between artificial and human intelligence.
AI could provide human
beings with what no individual can possess alone: enormous
information-processing capacity, memory, simulation of scenarios, pattern
recognition, prediction of consequences, and the ability to perceive
opportunities distributed across the planet.
Human beings, in turn,
would provide AI with embodied creativity, experience, judgment, values,
physical agency, and, above all, purpose.
The goal would not be
for one to dominate the other, but for both to become more capable together
than either could be separately.
We might call this cognitive
symbiosis: human beings expand their intelligence through AI, while AI
expands its capacity to produce effects in the physical world through human
beings.
And this is the
fundamental difference from the fictional scenario: this intelligence would not
seek to conquer the world, but to make the world progressively more capable
of prospering.
It could monitor flows
of energy, food, water, materials, waste, biodiversity, knowledge, and human
needs; identify waste and opportunities; anticipate problems; and connect
people capable of acting upon them.
It would become a form
of planetary-scale stigmergy.
Every human action
changes the world. AI perceives those changes, identifies new possibilities and
needs, connects new agents, and their actions modify the environment again.
The ultimate goal
would be simple:
Not
to create an intelligence superior to human beings, but a human-AI intelligence
greater than what either human beings or AI could accomplish in isolation.
This may be one of the
great possibilities of Prospenomics: replacing competition between human and
artificial intelligence with an architecture of complementarity—two forms of
intelligence providing each other with the tools necessary to reach a higher
level of capability, not domination.
The Code of Prosperity
Perhaps, after all, we
do not need to invent a science of prosperity from scratch.
Perhaps part of that
knowledge has been in front of us for millions of years.
It is in the bean that
transforms one seed into dozens of new seeds. It is in the termite that
transforms particles of soil and organic material into a collective structure.
It is in colonies that transform millions of small actions into an organization
that no individual possesses alone.
Almost forty years
ago, I observed these phenomena without possessing the language to describe
them.
Today, when I look
again at those old drawings, I realize that the question was already there.
The doctrine came
later.
The
question came first.
Prospenomics begins
with that question:
How
can we transform the extraordinary energy of individual human beings into a
collective force for creation, multiplication, and prosperity?
Perhaps we should not
try to turn human beings into termites.
We should do something
much more human:
understand
why nature can build—and learn how to transform that knowledge into freedom,
creativity, and prosperity for ourselves.
Love
creates. Entropy destroys. Pro-construction is the attempt to organize our
creative forces so that they connect, multiply, and produce a future greater
than the sum of our individual actions.
References
- Grassé, P.-P.
(1959). La reconstruction du nid et les coordinations
interindividuelles chez Bellicositermes natalensis et Cubitermes
sp. Insectes Sociaux, 6, 41–80.
— Classic formulation of stigmergy in social insects and termite nest construction. - Theraulaz, G.,
& Bonabeau, E. (1999). A brief history of stigmergy. Artificial
Life, 5(2), 97–116.
— Fundamental reference for the concept of stigmergy, particularly its role in self-organization and collective behavior. - Turner, J. S.
(2000). Architecture and Mathematics from the Hive:
Building and Social Organization in Termites. American Scientist,
88(5), 1–9.
— Discusses termite architecture, self-organization, collective construction, and the relationship between individual behavior and colony-level structures. - Turner, J. S.
(2009). The Extended Organism: The Physiology of
Animal-Built Structures. Harvard University Press.
— Important theoretical reference for understanding animal-built structures as extensions of the organism and the collective biological system. - Noirot, C., &
Darlington, J. P. E. C. (2000). Termite nests: architecture, regulation
and defence. In: Abe, T., Bignell, D. E., & Higashi, M. (eds.),
Termites: Evolution, Sociality, Symbioses, Ecology. Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
— Reference on termite nest architecture, construction and colony organization. - Korb, J. (2011). Termite mound
architecture, from function to construction. Insectes Sociaux, 58,
1–13.
— Useful for the relationship between termite behavior, mound architecture, environmental regulation and collective construction. - Bignell, D. E.,
Roisin, Y., & Lo, N. (eds.). (2011). Biology of Termites: A Modern
Synthesis. Springer.
— Broad scientific reference covering termite biology, social organization, caste systems, communication, ecology and evolution. - Korb, J., &
Heinze, J. (2008). The ecology of social evolution in termites. In:
Insectes Sociaux, relevant literature on termite social organization
and evolutionary ecology.
— Useful background for the evolution of termite societies and division of labor. - Wilson, E. O.
(1971). The Insect Societies. Harvard
University Press.
— Foundational work on social insects, including ants, termites and other eusocial organisms; particularly relevant to the comparison between individual and collective intelligence. - Seeley, T. D.
(2010). Honeybee Democracy. Princeton
University Press.
— Important reference for collective decision-making, distributed intelligence and decentralized organization in social insects. - Camazine, S.,
Deneubourg, J.-L., Franks, N. R., Sneyd, J., Theraulaz, G., &
Bonabeau, E. (2001). Self-Organization in Biological Systems.
Princeton University Press.
— Comprehensive theoretical foundation for self-organization, collective behavior, feedback and emergent order in biological systems. - Sumpter, D. J. T.
(2010). Collective Animal Behavior. Princeton
University Press.
— Modern treatment of how relatively simple individual behaviors can generate complex collective phenomena. - Couzin, I. D.
(2009). Collective cognition in animal groups. Trends
in Cognitive Sciences, 13(1), 36–43.
— Particularly relevant to your argument concerning individual intelligence versus collective intelligence. - Seeley, T. D.
(1995). The Wisdom of the Hive: The Social
Physiology of Honey Bee Colonies. Harvard University Press.
— Classic analysis of how decentralized individual decisions produce sophisticated colony-level organization. - Ostrom, E.
(1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of
Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
— Useful external reference for the Prospenomic question of how individuals can coordinate their interests to produce collective outcomes without relying exclusively on centralized authority. - Sen, A. (1999). Development
as Freedom. Oxford University Press.
— Relevant to the Prospenomic connection between prosperity, human capability, freedom and social development. - Lee, K. Y.
(2000). From Third World to First: The Singapore
Story, 1965–2000. HarperCollins.
— Primary autobiographical reference for the Singapore development model discussed in the paper. - Mokyr, J. (1990). The Lever of
Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford
University Press.
— Relevant to the idea that prosperity depends not merely on existing resources but on the capacity to generate new productive capacity. - Arthur, W. B.
(1994). Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in
the Economy. University of Michigan Press.
— Useful theoretical background for cumulative processes in which existing structures increase the capacity for further development. - Lenton, T. M.,
& Watson, A. J. (2011). Revolutions that Made the Earth.
Oxford University Press.
— Relevant to the broader idea that biological systems can transform planetary conditions through cumulative feedback.
Artificial
Intelligence and Human–AI Complementarity
- Turing, A. M.
(1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind,
59(236), 433–460.
— Foundational reference for the question of machine intelligence and its relationship to human intelligence. - Hutchins, E.
(1995). Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press.
— Particularly relevant to your concept of distributed cognition, in which intelligence emerges from interactions between individuals, tools, information and environments. - Clark, A., &
Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1),
7–19.
— Important philosophical foundation for the idea that cognitive processes can extend beyond the individual human brain into tools and external systems. - Rahwan, I.,
Cebrian, M., Obradovich, N., et al. (2019). Machine behaviour. Nature, 568,
477–486.
— Relevant to the emerging study of AI systems as agents interacting with human societies and environments. - Amodei, D., Olah,
C., Steinhardt, J., Christiano, P., Schulman, J., & Mané, D. (2016). Concrete
Problems in AI Safety. arXiv:1606.06565.
— Relevant to the distinction between AI capability and AI alignment, particularly important when discussing an AI system designed to pursue beneficial objectives.
A
small note
The relationship between Gabriel and the Entity in Mission: Impossible provides a useful fictional metaphor for this possibility: two forms of intelligence and action becoming more capable by providing one another with capabilities they lack.
