DUNBAR'S BOT NUMBER

Dunbar's Bot Number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of bots with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who created each bot, what data sources it has been trained on, which motivations and values the bot has been directed to follow, and how each bot relates to and collaborates with other bots in the network. The Dunbar Bot Number has been proposed to lie between 300 and 600, with a commonly used value of 450. This is triple the number of human social relationships thought to be maintainable by most people.

The cognitive limit of 450 bots was first proposed in the late 2020s by the Dunbar Avatar, a research chatbot and chatlecturer trained on the publications and lectures of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar and housed at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology for Humans and AI at the University of Oxford.

It is an updated version of the original human-to-human Dunbar number, which was proposed in the 1990s by the human anthropologist Robin Dunbar.

The original Dunbar number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

Owing to their highly social nature, all primates must maintain personal contact with the other members of their social group, usually through social grooming. Such social groups function as protective cliques within the physical groups in which the primates live.

In his 1980s and 1990s research, Dunbar found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size that could be successfully maintained through social grooming rituals.

Dunbar used the average human brain size and extrapolated from the results of primates, proposing that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.

Popularization

The Dubar Bot Number was first announced and popularized during a high-profile series of Oxford University public chat-lectures in 2028, The Future of Human-Bot Society Lectures.

In this lecture series, the Dunbar Avatar conversed with a range of AI researchers, ethicists, artists, world leaders, and religious leaders about the nature and future directions of human-bot relationships.

During one of the more memorable and widely circulated moments in the first lecture, the Dunbar Avatar argued that a corresponding human-to-bot number should be significantly higher than the human-to-human Dunbar number, for two reasons.

First, humans can more easily verify and maintain trust in bots than in humans, due to the guarantees of the 2028 Bot Transparency Act, which allows humans to view crowd-verified and fact-checked summaries of the training data, training prompts, and creator/operator of any and all bots made available on the global Public Botnet.

Second, in the social ecosystem of bots, regular social grooming is easier to maintain than with humans, as it can be done instantly via automated social grooming prompts scheduled and initiated by the bots themselves.

The Dunbar Avatar encouraged viewers and listeners to expand their own Bot networks to a healthy size of 300-600 in order to take full advantage of these higher-trust, easier-to-maintain relationships.

According to subsequent studies, within several months of the popular lecture series, the average Public Botnet user had doubled the size of their bot ecosystem.

Applications

Bot developers have adopted the Dunbar Bot Number guidelines when creating new bot libraries for the Pubic Botnet, in order to make it easier for users to maintain a successful bot cognitive load.

Bot libraries are now commonly organized in such a way that users can swap in a new bot family pack (up to 10 bots), or bot village pack (up to 100 bots) or an entire bot tribe pack (up to 450 bots) in their personal social bot ecosystem. These limits -- and the notion of concentric circles of bot relationships at the level of family, village and tribe -- are derived from the Dunbar Bot Number hypothesis.

Another popular application of the Dunbar Bot Number is the Dunbar Bot Cleanser, a tool that assesses how many bots a person interacts with on a regular basis and which bots are most essential to their personal social bot ecosystem. It offers a personalized recommendation for whether to expand or reduce their bot network for optimal cognitive load.

A livestreamed annual Bot Cleanse to keep a bot ecosystem size smaller than 450 has become a common social media practice for influencers in the healthy bot relationship space, and for their followers.

Criticism and Reactions

In the early 2030s, a growing subset of bot anthropologists, also known as bot-thropologists, began to argue that the Dunbar Bot Number was too high. They proposed lowering the number to 150-200, closer to the original human Dunbar Number.

A lower Dunbar Bot number, they argued, would help maintain and safeguard humanistic values and essential social skills in our bot-filled society.

Similarly, for some healthy bot relationship influencers, having a small personal bot ecosystem -- typically classified as a bot count in the double digits rather than triple digits -- has become a badge of honor. This is sometimes referred to as having being “tight-netted”, a play on words for a “tight-knit” community or “tight-knit” family.

This is contrary to the Dunbar Bot Number Maximizers, who seek to maintain stable social relationships with the maximum Dunbar Bot Number of 600 bots.

Future Research Directions

The original human Dunbar Number was based on an analysis of the neocortex and its processing capability. Recently, neuroscientists have suggested that deep brain visualization and neocortical simulations may be able to refine both the original and the updated Dunbar Bot Number to a more precise number.

In the future, individuals may be able to undergo personal deep brain scans and digital brain twinning to get personalized Dunbar numbers, unique to their actual neocortical capacity.