Why Swarm Intelligence (a hive mind) would be a good thing for humankind · 2:33pm May 13th, 2016
How many horror movies and games are out there about the evils of a hive mind? How many times has it shown to be the death of individuality, where people are just mindless drones to this collective and they have no free will of their own? Its shown as this alien thing that is down right terrifying to people senses. They think that it would be a fate worse than death. Movie after movie shows those lone guns standing strong against the waves of drones, gunning them down in a last ditch effort to keep their individuality and make their own decisions.
What if I told you that a hive mind wouldn't really be like that? What if I told you that in fact it not only would be a far superior mentality for us to follow, but we are already taking steps towards this with our technology right now?
In a sense, we already are in a prototype of Swarm Intelligence with the internet, though its limited by our hunter gatherer instincts causing illogical infighting.
Question: What if everyone who was connected to the internet, and I do mean everyone, was able to put aside all of their differences for one week and work together for one common goal, whatever that goal was?
Could you imagine the amount of power, resources, skill sets, perspectives, and creativity that those billions of people could bring into such a progect? Whatever it would be it would be the greatest thing ever created because it was made with the unified minds billions of individuals.
Now you say such a thing couldn't happen, we would all devolve into petty squabbles and flame wars abysmally fast and we would not be able to have the focus required for billions of people working together like that. You aren't wrong; Primates like us are predisposed to only have about 200 stable relationships at any given time, despite what your facebook friends list would have you believe. Our intelligence and sapience can circumvent these instincts in part, but they still hobble our ability to work together in mass like that.
If we operated with Swarm Inteligence however, such a scenario would be just another Monday. Instead of having to roam around finding a pack to work in (aka a job) you would find your place in the swarm based on what your skills, interests, and talents are. In a very interesting way it would almost be like getting a cutie mark. You would know what your contribution to the swarm would look like, and you would work with others that are like minded without feeling threatened or hatred for the other groups that do different tasks than you. It wouldn't sacrifice your individuality, but rather utilize is to the best of its ability. Your individual thoughts would be fed into the central hub and taken into consideration with the billions of others. You would have a greater say over the state of the world than you ever had at a ballot box.
We are already getting there with the internet. How much more influence are the fans having over movies and television shows now that their imput is being fed directly to the creators via this connection? How much more powerful would that connection be if our minds were linked but our individuality was kept in tact?
We would need to replace pack mentality with this in order for it too work though. Pack mentality and Swarm intelligence do not mesh well with one another. You only need to look at the countless flame wars and infighting going on in the internet to see that this is the case. Packs operate on an "us vs them" style of thinking, while a swarms focus is for the hive as a whole.
Brain to Brain communication would be the next step in transitioning from Pack to Swarm styles of thinking.
The technology is already developing in this direction. Brain to Brain communication is possibly the next and most crucial step in such a transition. Once brain to brain communication becomes commonplace it would become much easier to organize people and get them to better understand their tasks at hand. They would be individuals, but they would have the shared knowledge and expertise of each other as well and would be able to do things that would normally take a lot more planning and laborious verbal communication. Knowledge could just be transferred into your mind instead of wasting years in a classroom. We would become far more productive and would be able to achieve nearly anything imaginable with such an interface.
What are your thoughts on this though? Do you think Swarm Intelligence is a good thing? Or does this sound like a horror movie? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, preferably brain to brain but in the comments works too.
....I'm not sure I like how you're approaching transhumanism. I view transhumanism as improving our humanity through revolutionary technology. You seem to see it as abandoning our humanity through revolutionary technology.
This isn't a protest against swarm intelligence or brain to brain communication--that's all very neat and comprehensible. It's just your continued insistence that we abandon pack instincts--that the mentality that brings groups together already in place is an obstacle to be removed, instead of an urge to be improved upon... I'm going to be honest, that one point turned this from something I liked to something I disliked.
3942155 If you could show me how pack mentality as it stands today could be scaled up to work with billions of minds at once I'm all ears; However the fruits of Pack Mentality in modern society speaks for itself. Racism, discrimination, crusades, you name it; one atrocity against human kind after another can be traced directly to this "us vs them" mindset that comes with the pack mentality. You can't bring the world together fully with this because it was never designed to bring the world together. It was designed to section people off into groups and have them fight over resources like food and land.
Something, may I remind you, that we are still doing to this day instead of focusing our efforts on something productive.
A hive mind would remedy that.
And note I'm not talking about getting rid of individuality or anything like that, Hive minds don't really do that. What it would do is bring people together and help them work towards a common goal.
3942265
Friendship.
Friendship is the product of pack mentality, refined to acknowledge that Us does not have to be limited by blood.
And you're oversimplifying. It's not Us versus Them, it's Us and All The Others. There's not one Them. There's many, and some of those groups are hostile, yes, but that's why there is an Us. To support the people in the Us. And we don't always fight All The Others.
It's not perfect. But it is helpful to many.
3942271 Actually this show is a bit closer to what I'm talking about than you think.
Cutie Marks reveal to ponies what their "special talent' and place in society is, and they feel a sense of accomplishment when they contribute with their special talent. They get along and work together with almost now infighting what so ever. In fact they get along so well they've had the same ruler for over a 1000 years. Its not an active example, its much more subdued and subconscious, but its very much a hive mind scenario. May I remind you that when their cutie marks were switched around, every single pony believed that those ponies had those special talents from the very beginning and that they always had the lives they temporarily took up. Not just the mane five, EvERY pony.
The benefits that come with friendship would certainly be in this scenario, and it would be with billions of people instead of a couple handfuls of them.
3942327
That's debatable. But also besides the point.
The show is a synergy of hive mind and pack mentality, not a pure-bred hive mentality. And the flaws of both systems are demonstrated. What does a Hive Mind do with an individual who cannot contribute to the current project? That was for the longest time the driving force behind the CMC, and multiple times it was pointed out cutie mark reductionism was not healthy.
3942372 If a hybrid of mentalities works better than a pure hivemind I'd certainly take it into consideration.
Also you are assuming people would be stuck with such limitations as not being able to contribute. The bodies and capabilities of the individual would be highly malleable and able to be customized in a variety of ways. The ultimate goal is to develop a species that can learn, grow and thrive not only on earth but in any environment in the universe.
3942327
I personaly think and everthing is ponting in that direction, that their memories were mixed because of the spell and not because they switched cutiemarks. It was more like that their minds somehow entangled with each other through the elements and their cutie marks switched places because of that. I think Cutiemarks apear because of the state of the mind and they further reinforce it. It's more like, when you realize what you realy like doing, your mind rezonates with magic and magic creates mark that further reinforces your talent. When Stralight took their cutie marks their mind didn't change but their talent became weaker.
How long were they doing it? Half hour, one hour, two hours. The other ponies could have thought it was some sort of bet or something like that and that they painted their cutiemarks over.
I also want to say we already probably have hive mind. But it is toned down, because with loud hive mind life wouldn't be possible.