Military missions are increasingly contingent upon the ‘emergent qualities’ of distributed cognition. Cognition is situated and shared across multiple agents, objects, and environments. The total information surround is evolutionary, chaotic, and presents workers with ill-defined dilemmas that proliferate across geopolitical boundaries under stressed conditions. Crew members are bombarded with multiple constraints as they encounter automation, situational awareness, and information warfare. To address these concerns the use of computational neuroscience/ubiquitous computing technologies are described. Ubiquitous computing means that computing elements are not integrated in a single workstation but are ubiquitous; they are distributed as everyday objects in an operative work environment. When complemented with evolutionary computing technology, computer structures (cellular thoughtonoma) are designed to ‘genetically evolve’ through natural selection to be ‘fit’ with environmental, technological, and worker demands. This paper discusses the symbiosis underlying thoughtonomous technologies and describes possibilities to radically redefine intelligent interaction and collaboration.
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