AI Queens vs. Bee Queens
Elena Fersman
![Elena Fersman]()
Elena Fersman
VP Head of Global AI Accelerator & Head of Silicon Valley Site @Ericsson | Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Generative AI | Computer Science | Telecommunications | Author | Professor | Speaker
Thank you, Jesper Mothander , for describing me as Ericsson's AI-queen! As many of you know, I love creations of mankind (be it technologies or organisations) that are inspired by nature. When I read the title of the article I immediately got an association with honey bees. There are indeed some similarities between work lives of a queen-bee and mine:
- Bee queen relies on many workers in the hive, who make sure that honey is being produced.
- When worker-bees that are loaded with good stuff such as nectar or pollen, drift into neighbouring hives, they are most certainly accepted by another colony.
- When there is a merge of swarms of bees from different colonies, the queen plays a crucial role in helping the bees from the two hives integrate into a single colony.
- Bee queen must effectively communicate to her team members (which is done through pheromones and behaviour to coordinate the activities of the hive).
- Bee queen takes responsibility for ensuring the production of new bees within the hive, and offers a safe environment to grow.
- Bee queen makes decisions about hive expansion, and resource allocation within the hive.
The bee queen cares about the colony, and relies on all the workers to produce results. She is responsible for the well-being and productivity of their colony as a whole and for the individual workers.
CEO at The Knowledge Foundation (KK-stiftelsen)
1 å¹´Queeeeen Elena! ??
Experienced Innovator and Business Leader in Sustainability and Tech | Project and Product Director | 2021 Women in Tech Global Awards finalist
1 å¹´There is the pop queen or the AI queen. Definitely I chose the AI one Elena Fersman ???? !
Data Science Researcher at Nokia
1 å¹´(Hi! A bee-lover here) Elena, I am going to accept your challenge and respond with my own question, which is not specifically to you but to the whole community: why do we (humans) tend to assign the queen bee a central role as decision-maker when we know that the hive behaviour is an emergent property and not something pre-designed by a central mind? Queen bee's signaling are the backbone of the hive behavior, but other elements have strong influence. For example, the queen generates the substance that inhibits the birth of other queens, but when the hive reaches certain size, the generated substance does not reach all the corners and then (surprise!) queen eggs appear... Eventually the new queen will probably lead to a split of the community, etc. This is a beautiful example of embodied cognition/computation that models a "population counter + theshold detection". We face a fascinating question here: to what extend is the queen (or any bee) cognizant of this thing we (the external observers) call hive? Is the idea of central decision making the best metaphor?
Experienced Executive Leader | Board Member | Strategy & Innovation Expert
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