Energy efficiency as manifestation of collective intelligence in human societies

摘要

This article attempts to assess the real capacity of national economies to optimize their energy efficiency, measured as real output per unit of energy consumed. National economies are assumed to be collective intelligences, striving to optimize a set of values, including energy efficiency. A set of 59 countries has been studied in this respect over the period 1990—2014, with the use of a multi-layer perceptron mimicking their collective intelligence, expressed in 14 quantitative variables. The results obtained suggest that economies studied optimize the proportion between their R&D effort and their fixed capital in the first place, then they strive to optimize their sheer economic and demographic scale, and only after these values, they optimize their energy efficiency. Further theoretical interpretation allows guessing the presence of an evolutionary function of sexual selection between social sub-structures.