Protocol Requirements for Self-organizing Artifacts

We discuss which properties common-use artifacts should have to collaborate without human intervention. We conceive how devices, such as mobile phones, PDA's, and home appliances, could be seamlessly integrated to provide an "ambient intelligence" that responds to the user's desires without requiring explicit programming or commands. While the hardware and software technology to build such systems already exists, yet there is no protocol to direct and give meaning to their interactions. We propose the first steps in the development of such a protocol, which would need to be adaptive, extensible, and open to the community, while promoting self-organization. We argue that devices, interacting through "game-like" moves, can learn to agree about how to communicate, with whom to cooperate, and how to delegate and coordinate specialized tasks. Like this, they may evolve distributed cognition or collective intelligence able to tackle any complex of tasks.