Then, in background sections 1, we review and define interdependence; 2) we justify why social science has failed to produce a coherent mathematics of teams (here, coherence describes a state of interdependence that has not been corrupted or interrupted: for example, see "redundancy" below); 3) we review the effect of task domain complexity to determine whether there is also an effect of interdependence on the complexity of the task domain besides the effect of domain complexity on interdependence, and 4) we justify our quantum model of interdependence based on the interdependence that exists among teammates. In the body of our article, we review what we know of the mathematics of interdependence in teams, what we know so far of its generalizations (e.g., how to exploit it), and some of the barriers remaining to make autonomous human-machine teams a new discipline of the science of interdependence.
1.3. Background: Justification for the rejection of Spinoza and Hume
Until now, most social science research has focused on the individual in the laboratory, not the interaction, which is governed by interdependence. While admitting to the ubiquity of interdependence in human affairs, however, in 1998 the leading social psychologist, Jones (p. 33, in [
17]), concluded that the study of interdependence in the laboratory led to effects that were "bewildering," sidelining the study of interdependence for a generation, but unfortunately leaving the individual as the primary focus of study.
According to Spinoza [
10], no causal interaction exists between bodies and ideas, that is, between the physical and the mental [
18]. Whatever happens in the body is reflected or expressed in the mind. This notion by Spinoza has led to the assumption that aggregating the observed cognition of individuals subsumes individual behaviors [
19], thus needing only independent data (viz., i.i.d. data; but see [
20]) to improve the lives of individuals or for the betterment of teams.
In the same vein, Hume’s [
11] "copy principle" holds that there is one–to–one correspondence between ideas and reality.
Consider individuals first. Spinoza’s and Hume’s idea has led to the development of modern measures in the laboratory for individual perceptions and beliefs that correlate strongly with other self-perceived measures. For example, self-esteem has been found to correlate significantly with other measures of mental health, leading the American Psychological Association in 1995 to consider self-esteem to be the premier goal for "the highest level of human functioning" ([
21]). However, since then, and despite self-esteem’s strong correlations with other self-perceived skills, Baumeister and his team found that self-esteem in the open was not correlated with actual academic or actual work performance ([
22]).
Similarly, in recent years, the concept of implicit racism has been significantly involved in driving major changes across social, academic and work relationships; however, the implicit racism concept was found to be invalid in 2009 [
23]. Despite the failure of this concept, numerous training events designed to counter the "ill" effects of implicit racism have taken place, but the results have been "dispiriting" [
24]. Further, a National Institutes of Health panel asked "Is Implicit Bias Training Effective," concluding that “scant scientific evidence” existed.
1 Yet, Leach, the lead editor of groups in Social Psychology, has pushed his journal members to focus exclusively on biases [
25]. But this persistence on applying concepts for individuals developed in the laboratory that subsequently fail to be validated has led to the present replication crisis in the social sciences [
26]. Not understanding that the complexity of the domain and the task at hand may lead to sampling bias and negatively affect the understanding of interdependence.
We are not concerned with the replication crisis, per se. But we are concerned with why the individual model seemingly cannot be generalized to the interaction or to teams.
Traditional models also include large language models like game theory and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Strictly cognitive, for game theory, Perolat’s team [
27] concluded that real-world multi-agent approaches are “currently out of reach for state-of-the-art AI methods.” In the research highlights for the same issue of
Science, Suleymanov said of Perolat’s article: "real-world, large-scale multiagent problems … are currently unsolvable." ChatGPT and two-person games are also assumed to easily connect to reality, but ChatGPT skeptics exist ([
28];[
29]). Quoting from Chomsky’s [
30] opinion in the
New York Times:
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs—such as seemingly human like language and thought. These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence …That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking …[and] cannot occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. …The crux of machine learning is description and prediction; it does not posit any causal mechanisms or physical laws.
With ChatGPT, an artificially intelligent mind is based on the use of reinforcement learning in large-language models, often making common-sense errors that indicate a poor connection between the artificial mind and physical reality. Chomsky’s position mirrors that of AI researcher Judea Pearl’s conclusion when he recommended that AI researchers could only advance AI by using reasoning with causality ([
31,
32]). We add that reasoning about causality cannot occur with teams or systems composed of humans and machines working together without accounting for the interdependence that physically exists in the social sphere, especially among human-human teammates. Otherwise, ignoring interdependence for human-machine teams would be like treating quantum effects as "pesky" in the study of atoms.
Again, our problem is not with biases, the replication crisis, or large language models, but the results which indicate that there is little guidance to be afforded by the social science of the individual for the development of autonomous human-machine teams. This sad state changes dramatically if instead we treat the current state of social science as evidence of the measurement problem reflecting an orthogonality between the "individual" and the "team," or between language (concepts) and action [
33].
Indeed, we suggest that the state-dependency [
34] created from the interdependence between individuals and teammates may rescue traditional social science from its current validation crises. Simply put, if the "individual" is orthogonal to its participation in a "team," then by measuring the individual, evidence of the team is lost, explaining why complementarity has failed to produce predicted effects in close relationships [
35]. Similarly, it may be true that language isolated from of the effects of physical reality explains why ChatGPT has been criticized for its disconnect from reality; i.e., the complexity inherent in large language models impedes the “identify [of] state variables from only high-dimensional observational data”; in [
36]). From an interview of Chen, a roboticist at Duke University “I believe that intelligence can’t be born without having the perspective of physical embodiments” (in [
37]; see also embodied cognition, in [
9]; [
6]). We go further than Spinoza-Hume and Chen by asserting that embodied thoughts derived while operating in reality cannot be disambiguated from each other. This accounts for Chomsky’s [
30] conclusion that ChatGPT does not capture reality.
1.4. Background: Domain complexity of a team’s task
Open-world and especially real-world learning has taken on new importance in recent years as AI systems continue to be applied and transitioned to real-world settings where unexpected events, novelties can, and do, occur [
38]. When designing AI systems with human-machine teams, likely, the novelties cause additional uncertainties, the team’s performance drops, and cause conflict. This is exactly where belief logics, or disembodied languages, fail [
2]. It is interesting that Chatbot or intuition is unable to address causality [
31,
32], but quantum logic works well, yet quantum logic is unable to provide a consensus interpretation or meaning [
39].
When designing an AI that can operate in real-world domains, we need to know about the level of complexity of the target task. The complexity level of task domain affects the interdependence of the human-machine team. Regardless of the complexity in the structure of a team, by reducing its degrees of freedom, the perfect team operates as a unit, the reason why the “performance of a team is not decomposable to, or an aggregation of, individual performances” [
40]. A decomposed structure can be very complex, but while that may be, as its complex pieces begin to fit together, the degrees of freedom
reduce, thereby reducing structural complexity. The structure’s “decomposed” complexity should match the complexity of the problem addressed, the structure as it
unifies allows the unified structure to be able to produce maximum entropy (MEP). This latter part conserves “the available free” energy, i.e., the more free energy consumed by a structure to make its team “fit” together, the less free energy available for team productivity.
The complexity level of the task domain defines the skills and tools that an agent or team of agents need to perform successfully. These skills are composed of mental and physical skills. Knowing the skills needed to successfully perform a task defines the number and the combination of human and machine agents with tools needed to form a human-machine team. The complexity level of the task domain also defines the level of their interdependence in the human-machine teams, each with certain skill sets that complement a team’s mission. Further, understanding the complexity of the agents that are human and machine will help to define which agent (e.g., namely human or machine) with the appropriate skills and the number of them needed to perform a task.
In other words, the complexity of a task domain defines the skills that a particular human or machine agent needs to fit with a machine or human agent’s skills; e.g., for a task that requires a team member to have good vision at night, the human-agent team needs night vision skills. However, a particular human agent who happens to be near-sided and cannot wear corrective contact lenses (physical skill) may not be eligible to participate in a night-time task. Thus, the human-agent teams must be able to be equipped with the tools and the appropriate skills to function on a mission.
Understanding the complexity of the task domain helps in: transitioning from theory, to simulations, to laboratory and to real-world domains; understanding the boundaries and limitations; understanding the risks for the team and agents, decreasing the uncertainties regarding fit; avoiding sampling bias; forming anticipatory thinking; defining causality in embodied thinking; and forming an understanding of skills, mental and physical skills, and number of agents needed to solve a problem.
Doctor et al. [
14] broke down domain complexity across domains into intrinsic and extrinsic components and each into subcomponents. Intrinsic domain complexity is where the agent performing a task does not change the complexity of the task domain. The extrinsic complexity of the domain depends on an agent’s skills; e.g., if the task domain is to lift a rock, its complexity will differ for an agent that is smaller than the rock versus a larger agent that can pick up the rock or a machine that can lift a rock. Although [
14] referred to interaction with other agents, they did not address interdependence of teams of multiple agents.
The interdependence exists in extrinsic domain complexity space. Interference reduces internal complexity when interdependence is constructive, increases complexity when the interference is destructive; plus, destructive interference may consume all of the available free energy from a project, collapsing productivity; e.g., divorce in marriage or in business. However, the intrinsic domain complexity contributes to the skills that the agents need and the number of them, which indirectly affects the interdependence of human-machine teams. However, redundancy increases complexity, decreases interdependence (e.g., free riding) and reduces performance [
41].
1.5. Background: Justification for the quantum model of interdependence
The most well-known model of state-dependency is quantum mechanics [
34]. In our research, we have postulated that the relationship between the team and the individual is state dependent, connecting our work to quantum mechanics. In this Sub-Section, we elaborate on this connection. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics led by Bohr [
42] argued that quantum waves were not real, but that these waves reflected an observer’s subjective state of knowledge about reality. In Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation, the wave function is a probability that collapses into a single value when measurement produces an observable. In the Heisenberg and Schrödinger model, canonical conjugate variables form mathematical tradeoffs (e.g., position or momentum; time or energy). But, Bohr’s [
43] later theory of complementarity is his generalization of the tradeoffs existing between orthogonal perspectives common in ordinary human life (e.g., [
44]).
In quantum physics, quoting an article in Physics Today:
To date, most experiments have concentrated on single-particle physics and (nearly) non-interacting particles. But the deepest mysteries about quantum matter occur for systems of interacting particles, where new and poorly understood phases of matter can emerge. These systems are generally difficult to computationally simulate [
45].
Unlike this state of the experiments described in quantum physics, our research is designed to operate in the open for teammates interacting in teams, teams interacting with other teams, and systems of teams interacting with other systems.
Interdependence. By modeling Bohr’s complementary tradeoffs for teams, we have had success [
41]. To further advance our project, we seek a stronger mathematical foundation that human-machine teams can observe, interpret, and act upon. We begin with interdependence. The National Academy of Sciences concluded that the effect of interdependence, or mutual dependence between two or more agents, causes a reduction in their degrees of freedom [
5].
We are particularly interested in two types of entropy; Structural Entropy Production (SEP) and Maximum Entropy Production (MEP). SEP is based on the arrangement of a team; the choices of a team’s teammates; the capability of a team to work together seamlessly, to resolve its internal problems, and to allow adjustments to be made; but this entropy production should be as low as possible to allow the maximum amount of free energy available to be applied by the team to a team’s productivity. The choice of teammates is key—the only way to know that a good choice has been made is by the reduction in entropy with the addition of a new teammate, relegating the choice to a random selection. MEP is the maximum productivity output of a team; a team should want the maximum of its free energy available or as much as possible to be devoted to its productivity, to its targeted problem, to the maximum interdependence of its teammates to be fully engaged without free riding on the task at hand, all combining to increase the likelihood that for all teammates to be in the highest state of interdependence possible, it means relegating the members to orthogonal roles with minimal overlap (e.g., cook, waiter, cashier).
For example, the most powerful hurricane (MEP) has the tightest structure and the smallest eye (SEP) (see
Figure 1 below; [
46];
2. With this model in mind, we have found that the degrees of freedom associated with the structural entropy production (SEP) of a team forms a trade-off with the team’s maximum entropy production (MEP; in [
41]).
In this article, we will strive to improve and to advance the science of what that means. As an example of a mathematical model of interdependence used to study the effect of skill for a team’s state of interdependence, Moskowitz [
47] concluded that teams increase their "interdependence to optimize the probability of the Team of multi-agents of reaching the correct conclusion to a problem that it confronts.” In contrast, Reiche [
48] defines work interdependence as "the extent to which performing a work role depends on work interactions with externalized labor."
Interdependence as a resource. According to Jones (see p. 33 in [
17], although humans live in a sea of interdependence, his assertion that its effects in the laboratory were bizarre subsequently reduced its value as a research topic until it regained respectability with the Academy’s study in 2015 [
5]. Cummings [
49] reported his anecdotal finding that the better was a scientific team, the more interdependent were its members. Since then, we have learned that the interdependence between culture and technology is a driving force for evolution and a resource for innovation [
50]. In the future, we plan to model interdependence as constructive or destructive interference with the superposition of bistable agents by using a Hadamard gate. In such a model, the oppression of interdependence would be destructive interference. From another direction, an alert communicated among the interdependent members of a collective couples their brains, increasing their awareness of a possible danger, but also reducing the communication that needs to be transmitted [
51].
Social life is permeated with the effects of interdependence [
17]. For our study, we have arbitrarily described three effects associated with interdependence [
41]: bistability (e.g., two sided stories; multitasking; debates); a measurement problem (e.g., cognitive concepts commonly correlate strongly with each other, but not with their physical correlates, a part of the measurement problem; in [
22]); and non-factorability (e.g., fights among couples are common, but who is at fault is often undecidable without an outside observer or judge). We have found that non-factorability is the aspect of interdependence that more closely aligns with quantum mechanics.
Non-factorable is the defining characteristic of teams: the dependent parts of a team cannot be factored or disambiguated (in [
40]). The first person to discover this phenomenon, which he named entanglement, was Schrödinger (p. 555, in [
52]),
Another way of expressing the peculiar situation is: the best possible knowledge of a whole does not necessarily include the best possible knowledge of all its parts, even though they may be entirely separate and therefore virtually capable of being ‘best possibly known,’ i.e., of possessing, each of them, a representative of its own. The lack of knowledge is by no means due to the interaction being insufficiently known — at least not in the way that it could possibly be known more completely — it is due to the interaction itself. Attention has recently been called to the obvious but very disconcerting fact that even though we restrict the disentangling measurements to one system, the representative obtained for the other system is by no means independent of the particular choice of observations which we select for that purpose and which by the way are entirely arbitrary. It is rather discomforting that the theory should allow a system to be steered or piloted into one or the other type of state at the experimenter’s mercy in spite of his having no access to it.
Schrödinger’s idea, the whole being not equal to the sum of its parts, was adopted by Lewin [
4] as the founding idea of social psychology, and later by Systems Engineers as their founding idea [
53]. Schrödinger’s idea directly links quantum entanglement and interdependence.
Teams. In this study, our focus is on teams. In 2015, the National Academy of Sciences [
5], citing Cummings [
49], claimed that interdisciplinary scientists were the poorest of team performers, mediated by experience. We agree. An equation that we have developed to account for the interdependent tradeoffs between structure and performance makes the prediction that a team struggling to achieve a coherent fit among its team members will be a poorly performing team ([
33]; [
41]), supporting the claim by Cummings (see Equation 5, “The worst teams”). Also, the Academy claimed that teams enhance the performance of the individual, and our results point to the power of teams arising from a well-fitted team structure (i.e., decision advantage, discussed later; in [
41]).
One of our first results for teams dealt with the effects of redundancy on interdependence. We predicted and found that redundancy decreases interdependence [
33]; in contrast, as interdependence increases, the cohesion of a team ([
49] increases and is reflected by an increase in its effectiveness: “moderated by task interdependence such that the cohesion-effectiveness relationship is stronger when team members are more interdependent … [reducing their] degrees of freedom” [
5]. But, from Brillouin [
54], “Every type of constraint, every additional condition imposed on the possible freedom of choice immediately results in a decrease of information.” Thus, interdependent agents working together constructively (in phase) produce less Shannon information than independent agents. If correct, non-factorability means that information about the inner workings of a team are forever obscured to outsiders and to insiders, and that we must find another way to determine the best structure and best performance of teams.
We assume that a human’s brain projects various mental scenarios for the body’s actions in reality. At one extreme, the mind-body relationship for an individual is, however, more difficult to generalize to the effects of interdependence as expressed by Bohr’s theory of complementarity (but see [
44]). At the other extreme, when an individual is a member of a group, we assume that the human mind becomes otherwise fully engaged with the back-and-forth occurring among a group’s members and processes. A group is also an amorphous, non-exact phenomenon that can add or lose members over time with varying impacts on the group that may be independent of the reason a group was formed (e.g., some of the qualitative reasons to join a group include “the motivation for completing personal goals, the drive to increase self-esteem, to reduce anxiety surrounding death, to reduce uncertainty, and to seek protection,” in [
55]).
Not so for teams. The function of a team is to solve a targeted problem ([
47]; e.g., improving a team’s productivity, effectiveness, efficiency, or quality; in [
56]). A well-functioning team has the potential to raise the power of the individual or teammates in a team beyond that of the individuals independently performing the same functions but outside of a team (e.g., [
5]). Thus, we assume that the individuals independently performing the actions of a team when not a member of a team serve as Adam Smith’s [
57] “invisible hand,” forming a baseline that we have used in the past to determine the power of a team [
1].
At this point, our concerns are three-fold: First, how to model the interdependence in a team? Second, how to model the individual as a member of a team? And, third, how to measure an observable of interest for a team? With non-factorability in mind, we speculate that we can model the interference in teams with implicit waves in a state of superposition to represent interference; we can model the individual as contributing constructively or destructively to the interference in a team or faced by a team; and we use probabilities to predict the observable as the work products of a team evolve over time.
The quantum model: Waves and particles. From Dimitrova and Wei [
58], in quantum mechanics, objects manifest as waves or particles, never as a pure particle or pure wave, always both. Whether an object manifests more as a wave or as a particle depends on a specific experiment or measurement. For example, the interference effect in Young’s double slit experiment demonstrated the wave nature of light, while Einstein’s photoelectric effect demonstrated its particle nature. The collapse or measurement combines with Born’s rule to identify the interference pattern as a probability distribution for individual detection.
Waves introduce superposition which allows us to aggregate the contributions of a team’s members by adding constructive interference or subtracting destructive interference. From Zeilinger [
59]
[T]he superposition of amplitudes ... is only valid if there is no way to know, even in principle, which path the particle took. It is important to realize that this does not imply that an observer actually takes note of what happens. It is sufficient to destroy the interference pattern, if the path information is accessible in principle from the experiment or even if it is dispersed in the environment and beyond any technical possibility to be recovered, but in principle still ‘‘out there.’’ The absence of any such information is the essential criterion for quantum interference to appear.
Applying Zeilinger to our thinking about an individual who becomes a member of a team, superposition models the interference between these two states. Measurement will “destroy the interference pattern” that exists, but until then, the “absence of any such information is the essential criterion” for the existence of superposition. For example, we have found that redundancy produces destructive interference, reducing the effectiveness of a team [
33]. From the National Academy of Sciences [
40], the inability to factor the contributions of the individual members of a team is the Academy’s seminal finding: The “performance of a team is not decomposable to, or an aggregation of, individual performances” (p. 11, in [
40]). Thus, factoring a team into its individual members ends the state of interdependence; however, if a team can be factored into its parts, it is not in a state of interdependence.
Regarding trade-offs, given a Fourier transform pair (time-energy, position-momentum), Cohen [
60] found in signal theory that a “narrow waveform yields a wide spectrum, and a wide waveform yields a narrow spectrum and that both the time waveform and frequency spectrum cannot be made arbitrarily small simultaneously” (p. 45). While a convincing demonstration of trade-offs, Cohen was addressing signals easily repeated and replicated, unlikely with human-machine teams.
We are modeling the interaction with implicit waves. However, actual waves exist, too. For humans, gamma waves (>30 Hz) are a part of an inter-brain coupling (IBC) and synchronization that has been modeled with Kuramato weakly coupled oscillators [
61]. Modeling IBC is crucial to a theoretical framework of the causal relations between socio-cognitive factors, behavioral dynamics, and neural mechanisms involved in multi-brain neuroscience [
62]. Our plan is to build on this idea as a means to model the interdependence affecting a team.
The quantum model: Phase. We assume that phase is not relevant for an individual agent. But phase represents the effects of constructive or destructive interference influenced and instantiated by an interacting pair. When the phase is, on average, stable [
63], a team’s structure is coherent; where the coherence time may be impeded or reduced by internal factors such as redundancy or vulnerability, then phase can be adjusted to coordinate with the other members of a team. We attribute the responsibility for “adjustments” to a team’s leader (e.g., a teacher; a coach; a boss).
In the past, we have assumed that if the structure of the perfect team becomes a unit, by taking the limit of the operator for the logarithm of SEP, we have found that predictions for human-machine teams from the theory of complementarity are observations that a machine can make (e.g., to use deception inside of a team, do not contribute to the team’s structural entropy; reduce structural entropy production [SEP] to allow the free energy available to a team to be able to increase a team’s performance; a vulnerability becomes observable after an attack by witnessing an increase in an opponent’s SEP or a decrease in its performance entropy [MEP]; and by dampening interdependence, authoritarianism decreases a team’s ability to innovate and increases its need to steal technology to be competitive (in [
41]; [
1]). Next, we begin to include operators.
The quantum model: Operators. An operator
3 connects a wave function,
, with an observable. Operators infer the linear superposition of states, i.e., the effects of the interference from two or more states. An operator evolves one state in time into another. Under a measurement, an operator collapses a superposition into a measurement basis. The Hermitian norm squared
of the wave function gives the probability that an event can be observed in a physical space. For measurements, a Hermitian operator gives a real number for any of the wave functions it can discern, that is, that are orthogonal. An Hermitian operator associates a real number for each function in a set of orthogonal functions. If
is a Hermitian operator, its expectation value must be real:
; e.g., see below for the complementary pair of SEP and MEP interconnected with free energy.
We generalize the ideas from Bohr, Schrödinger, and the National Academy of Sciences [
5] to the interdependence between two agents, human or machine, operating together in a superposition. We assume that a human agent in interaction with another agent is in a bistable state, existing both as an individual and a member of a team. often in orthogonal roles. The superposition of individual agents or teammates, unlike independent mechanical objects in the physical world, occurs in interdependent states where two agents are dependent on each other, combining constructively or destructively to form patterns found in every social interaction (p. 33, in [
17]). We propose that the measurement of superposition can be modeled with an operator that collapses the superposition. However, if the agents are operating in orthogonal roles (e.g., cook, waiter, cashier), their individual views of reality should not align.
In what follows, we review what we have learned with the interdependent tradeoffs suggested by our equation that models the tradeoffs between a team’s human-machine structure and its performance; i.e., the better a team’s human-machine structure functions as a unit, the more likely its performance increases (maximum entropy production) for that structure.
Lastly, to make a "whole" team greater than the sum of its "parts," produced by a reduction in the degrees of freedom among a team’s members [
5], requires the glue of interdependence and a profound shift in our view of social reality to include the non-factorability of embodied information [
9], the search for team member fittedness, and the introduction of randomness for who and what fits into a specific team and why not.
In the next section, we review the mathematics of interdependence in reverse; first for non-factorability and then bistability. Previously, we have reviewed the measurement problem in depth [
41].