Hive Minds

The concept of linking many minds together to act in concert, or even fuse into a new singular entity, has been popular in science fiction for decades. Today we will explore the idea and Networked Intelligence in general, to see how realistic it is, and what benefits or concerns might arise from it.

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Graphics Team:
Edward Nardella
Jarred Eagley
Justin Dixon
Katie Byrne
Kris Holland
Misho Yordanov
Murat Mamkegh
Pierre Demet
Sergio Botero
Stefan Blandin

Script Editing:
Andy Popescu
Connor Hogan
Edward Nardella
Eustratius Graham
Gregory Leal
Jefferson Eagley
Luca de Rosa
Mark Warburton
Michael Gusevsky
Mitch Armstrong
MolbOrg
Naomi Kern
Philip Baldock
Sigmund Kopperud
Tiffany Penner

Music
AJ Prasad, "Cold Shadows"
Lee Rosevere, "It's such a beautiful day"
Kai Engel, "Morbid Imagination"
Sergey Cheremisinov, "Jump in Infinity"
Markus Junnikkala, "A Memory of Earth"
Brandon Liew, "Into the Storm"

[JohnMichaelGodier]

Hive minds are all fun and games until someone decides to start digitally copying themselves and gaming the mind. Ultimately, it could hack the other minds to become itself until finally it goes from "We are the Borg" to "We are the Kardashian". And that may be what happened to the Borg, if one thinks about it. Anyway, back to the coffee.

[Tyneras]

One hypothesis I heard about the Borg as to why they act so dumb was that their network architecture was fantastic when they were, say, a single planet. But it didn't scale well, and when the Borg collectively realized that they were getting negative returns on new members, they were too stupid to devise a better solution.

[AvailableUsernameTed]

We are Ohio. Resistance to paying taxes is futile.

[FloatingWeeds]

Honestly, Isaac, I'm so blown away by your content. Not only is it comprehensive and well-scripted, but your upload schedule is the most productive and durable I have ever seen on YouTube. Sir, you are an astounding person, putting together episodes that far exceed the technical depth and length of Kurzgesagt videos (which I also adore), with over 700% more content per month and just a small team to back you up. Plus, you give Google Hangouts live interviews, and hold down a full-time job? I should stop gushing over you and your prolificity, but I'm just blown away. Having seen over 30 of your videos (I know, I need to catch up!), I just want to let you know that as someone who generally does have a difficult time understanding people when they don't articulate, it was not a great task to overcome the truly slight intelligibility deficit in your scripts. I'm sure that, as with everything else you seem to put forward, it took you practice. But I just want you to know that your enunciation and general clarity of expressed ideas is really top notch on YouTube or, frankly, anywhere else. 20 years ago, you would have been a star on Discovery Science Channel. I wish you the best in your career(s) and hope that you will gain all the recognition from your target demographics that you desire. Have a wonderful 2018, dude.

[jetflaque]

"The borg are idiots" Isaac Arthur 2017

[billysbilbolag]

Welcome back to another episode of: The speed of light and laws of thermodynamics suck, with your host Isaac Arthur

[viktator]

I think it's interesting that you mentioned cities as an example and said it sacrifices some privacy, which is why some prefer the countryside. However arguably one has the most privacy in a crowd. In small community there is no privacy, because everyone knows everyone, but in a city you are anonymous. One could also quote the Great Gatsby here: “I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” Thus in a very large hivemind your could really have quite a lot of privacy in practice.

[LoneCoast]

21:40 and the "grandparents calling you up to babysit your uncle" from whichever episode it was; gave me a good laugh.

Thank you

[jbsayno]

The hive only has 17 nodes, each one down voted this video. They're mad that Isaac doesn't want to be #18

[christianshiels]

"Transcendence" is a terrific story/movie that shows the power of the hive mind idea in more of a positive light. The badguy in that story is actually the fear of the hivemind and or religious aspect of how far humans Should go when developing AI

[gatekeeper]

I have a new goal in life know: Make my computer eat my neibours.

[batchulin]

Are you sure Isaac, don't you remember the great Kidney revolt of 1955.

[cannonfodder]

"Otherwise you end up dreaming tax code debates or a C-span live stream." Had me chuckling at that line, fantastic episode as always.

[gabrielblack]

I really do love this channel. It gives my a place to go to where I can relax and listen to deep thoughts on interesting subjects and then go down into the comments and only see intelligent conversation. And the best part is, it happens every week. I don't know how it is done, but I thank you for it.

[Beamer]

“The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.” - Terry Pratchett

"To assess the intelligence of a committee, divide the IQ of its stupidest member by the number of members." - Robert A. Heinlein

[lastsilhouette]

On the Fermi Paradox:
Instead of looking for a single reason why we don't see aliens, why couldn't it be a combination of ALL the factors brought up in the Fermi Paradox Compilation? Like, some go the hive mind route, some hide inside super computers, etc...

[brokenmirror]

*Ceases all activity to watch the video*

My favorite hive mind that I can think of off-hand is the uplifted ants in "Children of Time". The uplifted spiders end up winning a war with a continent-spanning ant super-colony and end up breeding ant colonies to perform different functions which we have developed machines for, like metal smithing, chemical and weapons production, computing. Eventually they end up getting to the point where they create an orbital defense (literal) web.

[richardgreen]

We already have hive minds - We call the corporations.
I remember an associate who routinely referred to our headquarters as the "ant hill".
Also, in a more primitive context, there is the tribe.
You may think of yourself as distinct from the other members of your tribe, but outsiders might not be concerned with your individuality - only with your expected hive dynamic.

[seraphina]

I think when people assume that any possible hive mind would always automatically completely take over all individuality fail to recognise the fact that we already have many systems we have built to allow our computers to selectively share their resources all without compromising their ability to perform their own individual tasks at will. BOINC, Peer to peer filesharing, DHT to name a few there is no reason we couldn't adapt our knowledge and experience from that to networked minds.