Or perhaps, we could just talk about "information" in the Shannon sense, where these redundancies are formalized.

Ah great insight - we could quantify information novelty/scarcity/surprise. I wonder if we could use Shannon to model how fast our infinite aliens would get bored.

In any event, you can imagine a sensor-rich world where there's simply more, and more useful, info avail to some centralized mega-brains, enough that allows them to outcompete the more numerous multi-agent model.

You just wrote the plot to at least half of the next decade's dystopian scifi movies.