They say two heads are better than one, so what about two billion?
Today's topic is Hive Minds and Networked Intelligence, and I should start by saying
they're not entirely the same thing.
Indeed while Hive Minds is mostly a subcategory of Networked Intelligence, it has a lot of
subcategories of its own too.
Probably the best known example of a Hive Mind from fiction is the Borg from Star Trek,
and those fellows are sufficiently horrifying that it gives Hive Minds a pretty bad reputation.
To be fair though, they are rarely presented in a positive light in fiction.
We'll try to look at some positive aspects and examples today, but to be honest I think
I'd rather jump off a cliff than be part of most versions of them so I'm probably
not a neutral spokesman.
Networked Intelligence is another story, as a broad category, and Networked Intelligence
itself is one of the three types of Intelligence and possible paths to Super-Intelligence we've
discussed.
One of the others is Speed Intelligence, when the mind is the same except sped up.
That is simple enough conceptually and we've talked about it extensively in other episodes.
Networked Intelligence and Quality Intelligence, which is hard to define beyond the difference
between a lone genius who solves a problem a room full of other experts could not, are
both types we've spent less time on and today we'll fix that for the former.
The first key to thing though about networked intelligence is that it's already something
we have.
And I don't mean in the way humans themselves are arguably a colony organism composed of
many different types of cells and organs.
Unlike the most integrated forms of Hive Mind, you're not a bigger intelligence composed
of smaller intelligences so I think we have to exclude individual humans as an example
of a Hive Mind.
Defining a networked intelligence is a bit tricky, in order to avoid trivial examples
like a herd of animals with limited communication.
Normally with futuristic concepts I always encourage folks to avoid definitions that
would include ourselves since that tends to indicate the definition is bad, you and I
are not cyborgs, it's nice to point out how things like our glasses or tooth fillings
or similar can be argued to be mechanical augmentation of a human, but it's clearly
not what we mean by cyborg so you probably have a bad definition if it includes modern
humans.
Similarly, humans are not what we mean when we say Networked Intelligence or Hive Mind,
but human civilization was built by us becoming a simple networked intelligence.
Moreover we recognize such things exist and it's implicit whenever we refer to group
or organization that are beyond classic family and genetic groupings.
This company, that sports team, that church or village or city or country, we do regard
as an entity in its own right.
A network being a bunch of ropes tied together to create a net, usually with nodes, or knots,
it's probably not too surprising the definition of network is pretty hazy too, but for today's
context we'll say the simplest thinking network would be several individual nodes,
human minds in this case, connected together exchanging information.
Clearly we've been doing this since before there were humans, since even the most basic
of body language and noises inside some pack of animals is an intentional exchange of information.
If you want to stretch the point, you can argue that even two simple organisms exchanging
DNA to make a new one is pretty sophisticated communication and you can really stretch the
point and include even a simple unicellular organism that reproduces by mitosis, by dividing
itself, arguing it is a giant factory or many interdependent machines.
It's easy to forget just how complex such bacteria are but it is better to think of
them as a giant metropolis full of molecules as people and buildings than some tiny simple
organism barely bigger than an atom, after all, each cell usually contains trillions
of atoms.
Like I said though, we have to beware definitions of new concepts so broad as to be meaningless
not because it is inaccurate just inconvenient and not helpful.
I will just place the simplest of networked intelligences at the invention of language,
as that seriously jumped up both the bandwidth and integrity of those signals, and as a byproduct
allowed far more short term and focused specialization.
We see limited specialization in almost any group of cooperating animals, and we see intense
specialization in things like insect hives, but the sheer amount of fast and accurate
data that can be exchanged through human language allows us to train people with identical DNA
to perform very specific tasks not strongly shaped by their biology.
And we see that strongly with the emergence of cities, from which we get the word civilization
in the first place.
Very many people each specialized in very different tasks which could not possibly allow
their survival in isolation just doing that specialized task, all grouped together for
fast exchange of information and supplies.
Any definition being a bit arbitrary, I will set this as the simplest example of networked
intelligence for humans.
It also represents a huge paradigm shift and increase in resources and abilities.
Same as basic communication and tool use made humans jump up over other animals, the rise
of cities and civilizations gave a huge edge.
We have tons of technological improvements that make individual people more effective,
we've had many more that just let us increase how many people we can have alive and healthy,
our carrying capacity.
However, many of inventions were such boons because they improved the network.
Roads and bridges to connect rural areas to cities and cities to other cities, carrying
not just food and supplies but allowing the movement of people, ideas, and information.
Ships, railroads, highways, postal systems, radios, telephones, and these days the internet.
All can be viewed as an amplification and augmentation of basic human speech, which
allowed two people fairly near each other to exchange complex concepts quickly and accurately.
Even the invention of writing, which allowed communication not only over distance but over
time itself, improved this basic human network so that it could include dead people.
Long after they were gone, even from the memories of the next generation or two who met them
and spoke to them, writing allowed us to incorporate non-living humans into the human network and
the modern internet has allowed us to include computers and databases into that network
too.
We don't really think of ourselves as networked intelligence, some actual entity called humanity,
but even just those of us old enough to remember when the internet did not exist, and even
being exposed to it gradually so it lacked an explosive moment of transition, can see
a clear difference in the civilization we have now as opposed to then.
Technological changes happen so fast and frequently these days that we are a bit immune to seeing
how they've changed us, but it has still happened.
I wanted to note that though because a bit like cybernetics, networked intelligence is
one of those things where it happens gradually enough that we might just keep moving the
bar, folks a few centuries from now might be shot through with tons of devices, cloud
storing memories outside their head, and routinely talk to people by just thinking their direction
with the technological equivalent of telepathy, and still be talking about how in the future
people might be cyborgs or network their minds together, not like us of course.
But no matter how integrated human minds might get to be, the human itself is not the networked
intelligence, it's just a node of it, whether it's an individual or not.
Bob is not the networked intelligence of New York City, he's just a component of it.
On this subject of Networks and Hive Minds, we are obviously very interested in what happens
to the individual, if they still continue to exist or not or are free or not or have
privacy or not, but the individual is not the network, even if it is a key or irreplaceable
component.
Who is the network?
The network is the network.
We have a thought problem that's fairly interesting for developing this notion.
We've talked a lot about copying a human mind onto a computer substrate where the processors
emulate neurons.
That's an intuitive enough concept for folks, but you can just as easily – well not easily
– sit millions of people down with pencil and paper and have them perform all those
same calculations that the computer is doing, storing each result on paper and walking over
to hand each new bit to another calculator.
We can envision your neurons doing this to make you.
We can envision computer chips doing this to make you.
But there is something passing strange about the idea of a ton of people cranking all the
calculations out manually, including folks looking at a scenery and jotting down data
to be sent to giant skyscraper full of cubicles manned by the team that makes up your eyes
and optic nerve.
Yet by the same logic as the neurons or computer emulation, that would be you, and in this
case you would be a networked intelligence, all those people are your nodes.
You don't, as with the traditional hive mind, have access to their thoughts, you can't
control them, they are not indeed wired into your mind at all.
We could also replace them with a giant ant colony, a literal hive, that wasn't calculating
but perform those operations far more stupidly and simply, pushing colored or scented grains
around to serve as your bits and signals.
I like this example, where people or ants – our usual example of a hive mind – are
cranking out calculations to run your mind because it both shakes ups the notion of thinking
of an uploaded mind on a computer as essentially just a substitute brain – a black box doing
the work – and highlights that such a thing doesn't actually have to be composed of
the actual minds of its nodes in an intrusive manner.
I think it also easier to picture some place like New York City or Tokyo as a potential
real separate entity with thoughts when you've just tried to wrap your head around a million
people with pencil and paper running your mind.
I don't think I'd ever categorize one of these as a true networked intelligence
unless the mind being generated was actually smarter than the individual components each
were.
At least at some tasks, and while some group of people working on a problem together might
come up with ideas faster and better than an individual could, and maybe even ones no
individual would have thought of, it's not really exhibiting much intelligence itself.
Of course in fiction it often is because its individual members have usually become drooling
morons.
At best one can justify this with the assumption that collective mind is using every spare
bit of processing power, up to and including the bits that process stuff like optical signals
so that people can walk right by drones without even being seen maybe, but this is mostly
just bad writing.
Or very good writing, in the case of Star Trek's Borg the writers are presumably more
focused on making a dreadful inhuman enemy that dehumanizes people, and nothing better
shows that than folks stumbling around without apparent self-awareness, like a zombie.
So I won't knock the writer's from a story standpoint, just a logical and science standpoint.
The Borg are idiots, individually and collectively, and I doubt that demonstrates an actual hive
mind properly, even if I love them as villains.
I think I preferred Unity, a parody of the Borg from the cartoon Rick & Morty, where
the titular character Rick gets the hive mind Unity drunk and it comments how it probably
shouldn't be trying to run 200,000 Pediatric hospitals and 12 million deep fryers in that
state.
And it's a key point about such hive minds, that if you're composed of lots of individual
components designed for doing such things on their own, you probably shouldn't be
running them.
Humans not only have components of ourselves we control subconsciously, but plenty of bits
that operate with no control whatsoever, I don't need to tell my DNA to unzip and replicate,
though it might be handy to be able to tell it when to do that and when not to.
Indeed we do have some regulation methods inside the body and cancer can result when
that breaks down.
I'd imagine a Hive Mind could develop the equivalent of cancer, and if it layers up
a lot minds, sub-minds that supervise this or that, it would have to worry not just about
individual members leaving or attacking it if they did, but also sub-minds, smaller hive
minds, rebelling or breaking away.
Obviously the more autonomy you have at the lower levels the more of an issue that would
be, my kidneys have never tried to declare independence or stage a revolt.
Hive minds though could easily end up undergoing such breakaways or mitosis as a form of reproduction.
In the absence of instantaneous communication it might need to as well.
I mentioned a few episodes back in Digital Death that a human brain spread out to the
size of planet, but with its signals switched over to light speed ones, would process at
the same rate as a normal human mind, spread out beyond that and you either need some form
of FTL communication or you will start suffering time lag issues.
So spreading a hive mind over multiple planets, let alone solar systems, would seem a serious
limitation.
I tend to be skeptical about us ever inventing any form of FTL, but even if we grant it for
the moment, a lot of fictional and theoretical FTL methods are simply faster than light,
not instantaneous, or have serious bandwidth issues.
You can probably run an interstellar empire on dial-up modem speeds, the old Battletech
& Mechwarrior franchise did that, but I can't see running a hive mind that way.
This is one possible Fermi Paradox Solution that gets kicked around too, that aliens don't
spread out from their homeworld much because they converge to being hive minds or get replaced
by singular entities like a Super-intelligent planet sprawling computer.
I tend not to bring it up in Fermi Paradox discussions because it's not a good one,
but it is of interest today.
It's not a good one because you can't assume every civilization does this, you can't
assume none would be willing to subdivide to found a small new hive mind in another
system, and it still suffers from the Dyson Dilemma, in that you can build Dyson Swarms
around your own home star and as we saw in the Mega Earths episode you can just keep
building those up with resources brought in from elsewhere until it is galactic mass and
hovering just above the critical density to turn into a black hole, either as a Birch
Planet or a truly huge Dyson Swarm of Dyson Swarms.
I think most hive minds would be willing to reproduce by making a new one elsewhere, but
they might not like the idea of essentially making a rival, and for that matter they might
need a certain minimum number of people just to make existence bearable for those colony
splinters.
In Kevin J. Anderson's Saga of the Seven Suns you've got a limited hive mind, the
Ildirians, who tend to need to do everything big, including their defense fleets, just
to have enough of them in one place to stay effective and sane.
The Geth from the Mass Effect franchise had that issue too.
If that was hard to overcome you'd probably need to bring resources back rather than expand.
Now there's the question of who would go out and retrieve those resources from around
the galaxy, but any hive mind that can't design an automated mining vessel obviously
came out a loser on the deal when it became one.
It's the same issue with folks living in virtual realities, they might not want to
abandon their paradise to go harvest resources far away, but they shouldn't have to.
If you can make simulated paradises it implies you can make something smart enough to decently
mimic people to talk with in that paradise, so programming a ship to gather stuff and
bring it back ought to be child's play, and one would tend to think a hive mind could
do it too, especially since they presumably had to be pretty good with intelligence and
computers to make their hive mind in the first place.
That skips those that naturally evolved, who are often shown as being awful with computers
because they never developed them.
We get that with Morning Light Mountain in Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga and with
the Buggers or Formics in Ender's Game, and lots of other insect hive examples.
The former, Morning Light Mountain, cannot naturally speak faster than light, as most
of the fictional examples can, so it does have a decent head for electronics and cybernetics
but still never developed computers much.
In Ender's Game the Buggers do have instant communication and telepathy they naturally
evolved, indeed humans back-engineered their own interstellar communications off this.
Sort of, they knew it could be done since they could tell by watching Bugger ships react
to things faster than the speed of light should have permitted them to witness it, and knowing
it could be done, humanity then figured it out.
It is implied they need a queen reasonably nearby for this to work though, as a sort
of central node.
Though in later books it is stressed that the Queen's body is just one more drone
to her, albeit a critical one, and that she isn't really the queen or maybe even the
hive but more like our example earlier where your intelligence was run by ants.
We also get a retcon about the individual buggers actually having intelligence of their
own.
Orson Scott Card is pretty good about consistent canon by and large but some explanations changed
over the series, tweaked for consistency I assume.
I remember when I did the Stupid Aliens episode and mentioned the book I irritated some folks
discussing the Buggers, "That's not what it was in the book!" and kept having to
remind folks that it isn't a book, it's a series of around 20 novels and short stories
written over 30 years, and that they weren't saying I was wrong, they were saying the author
was.
Always a problem in science fiction when stuff needs retconning, or maybe didn't but gets
it anyway, a lot of folks were irritated when Alice Krige showed up in Star Trek First contact,
the film not the episode, as the Borg Queen, but it didn't bother me too much personally.
The Borg originally spoke with one voice out of thousand mouths, cold and alien and unified
like a sociopathic chorus so have a single queen talking seemed wrong, but to be fair
the borg originally were going to be an insectoid hive race but they didn't have the budget
so we get the black leather body horror look that seems like something out of Clive Barker's
Hellraiser franchise, so changes happen, and it gave the audience a central focus for their
villain.
There's also no reason a Hive can't have a mouthpiece, it's actually inefficient
to have a thousand people saying the exact same thing, and a hive doesn't have to be
homogenous with every member having the same function and status, insect hives aren't
like that after all, it could be a meat puppet to use as a collective voice or even a semi-independent
system.
Now the Borg are horrifying in their own right but the usual thing that bugs people about
them is that membership tends not to be optional.
Even in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, the rather benevolent Hive Mind of Gaia, which
still has modest individuality for its members, is plotting galactic takeover and by conscription
not volunteers.
It was not a popular move with most fans either, myself included, and is often guessed as the
reason why all future books in the series were set before the incident.
Nonetheless there are tons of examples of good hive minds in science fiction, especially
when telepathy seemed to be an omnipresent feature even in hard science fiction novels,
a trend I'm glad finally died off in the last couple decades, but common or not, rarely
do I hear folks speaking of them with enthusiasm.
Pretty much the only member of a Hive Mind in fiction I like is Nevil Clavain for the
Revelation Space series, it probably helps that he's a viewpoint character who joined
semi-voluntarily, never upgrades his implants from the earlier versions that were less connected,
and is often on bad terms with his own faction, the Conjoiners, so he doesn't exactly cheerlead
for them.
They also don't indiscriminately spread and assimilate folks involuntarily either.
Interestingly Clavain's faction in the books is often in conflict with the other faction
of humanity that is closest to being a hive mind too, the Demarchists.
They are more of a bunch of intelligences who are networked, so to speak, as like most
people they have a ton of mental implants but one of theirs, and the key one for their
specific civilization, is one that tries to go straight democracy, no representatives,
by having everyone vote on almost everything.
Sort of like if every bill in congress got text messaged to you for a vote, only as best
I can tell the implants allow them to do it mostly subconsciously and even asleep.
I'm assuming the implants in everyone's head know them individually well enough to
guess how they'd respond.
Forgetting the specific mechanics, that is kind of the ideal of most versions of democracy
and its parallels, everyone gets a say in what happens because everyone has an investment
in the outcome and a right to self-determination, so networking folks to make news and details
easier to get and absorb to make more informed decisions seems ideal.
Obviously taken too far you get a hive mind where nobody gets any say in anything because
there's no individuality leftover.
The other big issue is the privacy one, and that's a serious issue of the future even
when you're not telepathically linked to other people.
However in the networked intelligence case, short of a hive mind, I do think that's
just an artifact of telepathy in science fiction.
We associate telepathy as reading people's minds, not just the equivalent of a phone
or internet connection, so a method using that will understandably make you figure all
those minds can read each other and freely look around or even merge.
Again, part of why I don't like telepathy in fiction, made up non-science makes for
bad extrapolations of the future.
Folks end up picturing some mind eating hive or a bunch of folks joining hands around a
drum circle to meditate and combine their souls.
My computer, and thus me, is connected to the internet and to you, obviously, or you
couldn't hear me now.
I've never noticed my smartphone trying to merge into my brain even when I'm holding
it next to my head or my computer trying to eat my neighbors.
I can read my files from other computers in my house or on a network but only the ones
I've shared.
When you doing this stuff with mystical telepathy that presumably can't be done or it takes
special effort and training.
But when you do it with technology you have to understand how it all works, how brains
and memory function, to do it in the first place, so segmenting things off or only sharing
specific chosen bits is possible from the outset, and if I want people to know what
my schedule is, I can make that open just like my google calendar, or if I want only
my doctor to be able to look at my medical status, I can do that too.
So I think, when we're talking about a technological route to a more networked intelligence we
don't necessarily have to discard privacy and individuality to gain the many obvious
benefits.
You also probably don't have to go the all in or out option, one size fits all.
Living in a city traditionally cuts down privacy a bit, hence many of us prefer the peace and
solitude of the country, doesn't mean we're divorced from civilization.
So too, one can presumably set up such a network to allow people variable involvement to fit
their tastes, in general and at the moment.
Also just like civilization, you could enjoy sub-networks, I'm part of humanity and the
US and my state of Ohio and my little village and dozens of various related and unrelated
social or professional groups, my level of involvement in each varies and I can adjust
my commitment.
You could have a human overmind with, say, the sub-mind of Ohio, which was both a separate
entity and part of the Earthmind at the same time, and how much so might fluctuate, as
might its membership, with some joining or leaving and involving themselves to varying
degrees.
Vernor Vinge explores this notion with a race called the Tines in his classic novel, "A
Fire Upon the Deep", where we see small groups minds of often just a few critters
that often switch members who are not really individuals on their own.
There's a lot of options for this in fiction but I would tend to guess people who predict
this as an eventuality for humans are semi-correct.
Just my guess but the error being made is that folks don't want to give up their privacy
and individuality and must eventually mature to be okay with that, and I personally don't
see that as more mature or necessary, that you have to sacrifice privacy or individuality
to enjoy the benefits of a greater degree of networking and group cooperation.
Though I could easily see a lot of folks choosing that route, and so long as admission is voluntary
more power to them.
Obviously if you're too interdependent it makes it hard to get out there and settle
the galaxy, and we'll be looking at a first step to that next week in Colonizing the Oort
Cloud, which contains tons of potential places for us to colonize but usually so far apart
even compared to planets that no unified Hive Mind would be viable.
The week after that we'll leave the solar system and continue to explore the problems
with unification, especially with light speed limitations, in Interstellar Empires, and
then we'll finish out 2017 by heading out of the galaxy and asking if it is even possible
to settle other galaxies in a Universe without faster than light travel.
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Until next time, thanks for watching and have a great week!
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