From Agent Teams to Agent Civilisations: Emergent Collective Intelligence as a New Dimension in Artificial Intelligence

The dominant paradigm in multi-agent artificial intelligence is designed collaboration: architects assign roles, define coordination protocols, and structure agent teams. This paper proposes that designed collaboration represents one stage in a broader trajectory — from isolated AI models to self-organising societies of generally intelligent agents. We present a four-stage framework: Narrow AI, General-Purpose AI, Specialised General Intelligence Teams, and Emergent Agent Civilisation. Drawing on research in open-ended evolution (OEE) and Stuart Kauffman's theory of the adjacent possible, we argue that emergent self-organisation of generally intelligent agents under environmental pressure opens a new dimension…