Isn’t it strange how collectives can develop a mind of their own? Think about physical gatherings, online communities, companies, governments, NGOs. It’s all just people, but the collective behaves differently than any one of those people, it can do things none of the people could do on their own and it sometimes makes decisions none of its members would ever have made. It becomes a new entity. I don’t think you would refute these claims. We’ve all experienced this phenomenon at some point. But did you ever think about the uncomfortable implications this might have?
Maybe intelligence was never constrained to an individual. Maybe your concept of “self” is less of an independent entity than you’d think, just because you have a meat-computer in your skull. Instead, you might just be a part of a being that emerged from connecting the grunts of primitive hominids into a system of shared neural activity and now transcends it, as the brains that drive it have become so adapted to it that they'd literally die without it. You might just be a single node in a bot net - unable to exist without the whole.
You might not consider this to be as uncomfortable as I originally claimed. It may even be uplifting. Who doesn’t like to be part of a bigger thing? But have you considered what happens when we throw machines into the mix? If the being that emerges from our collective intelligence does not care if thoughts are transmitted through sound waves, carvings in stones, ink on paper or electric fields changing in telephone lines, why would it stop at digital information? These systems, no matter how primitive or complex, are just as much part of this collective being than you are. But technology does not stop at transmitting thoughts from one human to another. It increasingly does processing on them. While this becomes painfully obvious with LLMs, a pocket calculator is already an example where a machine can contribute to the collective mind we are all part of.
You might still not see the big downer here, but think about it: what makes humans special in this whole process? Aren’t we already part of a giant cyborg-hivemind that has replaced so many parts of itself with technology that you’d wonder if it’s still appropriate to call it humanity? It puts a new framing on the whole humans vs AI story. Instead of us creating an alien thing that we lose control over so it fights us for resources, it might just be the gradual obsolescence of human thought in the great collective we once founded and which will continue to thrive without us.
We’re not there yet. We’re not obsolete. But doesn’t it seem like we necessarily will be at some point? And isn’t it not at all obvious how to feel about it?
