Enter the Hivemind

Will humans be sus­cept­ible to hive­mind technology?

Some sci­ence fic­tion con­cepts per­sist. One such concept is the idea of con­nect­ing humans via digit­al interfaces.

From men­tal walk­ie-talk­ies to upload­ing and down­load­ing human minds.

I can­’t help but won­der: How far are we from cre­at­ing brain-inter­fa­cing tech­no­lo­gies? And would we be susceptible?

Let’s explore:

A Hivemind of Rat Brains

In 2013, the sci­ent­ist Miguel Nicolelis used elec­trodes to con­nect brains. Well, rat brains. The rats in the exper­i­ment began to syn­chron­ise their elec­tric­al brain pat­terns as if shar­ing their brains.

In tests to dis­tin­guish between brain pat­terns, the net­worked rats out­per­formed indi­vidu­al non-net­worked rats.

The tasks were simple enough, but the remark­able thing was that these rats wer­en’t even close to each oth­er. They com­mu­nic­ated via the inter­net. In one of these exper­i­ments, the rats were sep­ar­ated by thou­sands of miles.

“It’s the first organ­ic com­puter,” sci­ent­ists explained to The Guardian.

So, sci­ent­ists have demon­strated an “inter­net of brains” — in rats.

What’s next?

“I Know Kung Fu”

There’s no short­age of sci­ence-fic­tion cre­ativ­ity regard­ing digit­al inter­faces for the human brain, like how Neo learns kung fu in The Matrix.

It’s reas­on­able to spec­u­late about poten­tial use cases for elec­tron­ic brain enhance­ments. Learning an ancient mar­tial arts sys­tem in the blink of an eye would be cool.

But brain con­nectiv­ity does­n’t just have to be about adding fea­tures to brains. It could also be about adding new states of existence.

Co-exist­ence, even.

The Synchronicity Drug in Nexus

In Nexus, sci­ence-fic­tion writer Ramez Naam sug­gests a drug allow­ing you to feel what oth­ers are feeling:

“Chuan bought a round of drinks. A bleach blonde Thai girl in a low-cut blouse and unnat­ur­ally large breasts came up and snuggled into his arm. He star­ted telling a story about a drug called Synchronicity. Sam’s ears perked up.

‘Synchronicity?’ she inno­cently inquired. ‘What’s that?

‘It’s N and M togeth­er. The cham­pagne of trips.’ He kissed his fin­gers for emphas­is.

‘N as in Nexus?’ She wanted him to spell it out for her.

‘Yeah. And M as in Empathek. The M makes you want to con­nect, want to under­stand, want to love. And the N actu­ally lets you feel what oth­er people are feel­ing. It’s beau­ti­ful. Magical.’ ”

Since these syn­chron­isa­tions are trans­ferred elec­tron­ic­ally, the inter­net could be a car­ri­er for such connections. 

Will we see a new spir­itu­al web? A new porn web? A unique, prob­lem-solv­ing web? A new artist­ic and cre­at­ive web? A new type of social media?

Will we see new group sizes?

Social Group Sizes (For Social Brains)

How many social con­nec­tions you you com­fort­ably sus­tain? According to the social brain hypo­thes­is, lim­its exist. ¹Zhou WX, Sornette D, Hill RA, Dunbar RI. Discrete hier­arch­ic­al organ­iz­a­tion of social group sizes. Proc Biol Sci. 2005 Feb 22;272(1561):439 – 44.

“The ‘social brain hypo­thes­is’ for the evol­u­tion of large brains in prim­ates has led to evid­ence for the coe­volu­tion of neo­cor­tic­al size and social group sizes, sug­gest­ing that there is a cog­nit­ive con­straint on group size that depends, in some way, on the volume of neur­al mater­i­al avail­able for pro­cessing and syn­thes­iz­ing inform­a­tion on social rela­tion­ships.”
Source: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences ²Zhou, X., Sornette, D., Hill, R. A., & M. Dunbar, R. I. (2005). Discrete hier­arch­ic­al organ­iz­a­tion of social group sizes. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 272(1561), … Continue read­ing

Scientific evid­ence sug­gests that people tend to organ­ise them­selves not in an even dis­tri­bu­tion of group sizes but in dis­crete hier­arch­ic­al social groups of more par­tic­u­lar sizes:

Alas, there seems to be a dis­crete stat­ist­ic­al order in the com­plex chaos of human relationships:

“Such dis­crete scale invari­ance could be related to that iden­ti­fied in sig­na­tures of herd­ing beha­viour in fin­an­cial mar­kets and might reflect a hier­arch­ic­al pro­cessing of social near­ness by human brains.“
Source: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences ³Zhou, X., Sornette, D., Hill, R. A., & M. Dunbar, R. I. (2005). Discrete hier­arch­ic­al organ­iz­a­tion of social group sizes. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 272(1561), … Continue read­ing

Read also: Group Sizes (The Social Brain Hypothesis)

A Neuralink for Humanity

In 2017, Elon Musk and Paul Merolla pub­licly launched Neuralink. Since then, neur­os­cient­ists have come and gone. Not much is known about how it’s going, but Musk was allegedly inspired by sci­ence-fic­tion writer Iain Bank’s neur­al lace.

Although, some pro­gress has been showcased:

“In April 2021, Neuralink demon­strated a mon­key play­ing the game ‘Pong’ using the Neuralink implant. While sim­il­ar tech­no­logy has exis­ted since 2002, when a research group first demon­strated a mon­key mov­ing a com­puter curs­or with neur­al sig­nals, sci­ent­ists acknow­ledged the engin­eer­ing pro­gress in mak­ing the implant wire­less and increas­ing the num­ber of implanted elec­trodes.“
Source: Wikipedia

Critics have argued that Neuralink has been unable to demon­strate any sig­ni­fic­ant break­throughs. And there has­n’t been expo­nen­tial devel­op­ment since Nicolelis’ rat brain exper­i­ments in 2013.

Technological advance­ments aside, it’s reas­on­able to assume that there are two main fields of progress:

Which of these poten­tial dir­ec­tions of pro­gress holds the most prom­ise for near-future application?

Transhumanism and Human Cyborgs

In 2017, CyborgNest launched NorthSense, a small cir­cuit board with pier­cings to con­nect it to the wear­er­’s body. The gad­get lets its wear­er sense the Earth’s mag­net­ic field and always knows the North direction.

Others have had an RFID chip implanted to use instead of extern­al chips.

Technological aug­ment­a­tions like these are inter­est­ing, but the advance­ments seem prim­it­ive. In 2022, CyborgNest is work­ing on launch­ing Sentero, a device that allows you to share exper­i­ences with oth­er Sentero users. But they’re strug­gling, and going out of busi­ness seems to be a pos­sible end­ing for the startup.

As a move­ment, transhuman­ism seems to be more of a philo­soph­ic­al and intel­lec­tu­al move­ment thus far.

On the prac­tic­al side of human aug­ment­a­tion, we mostly see grand ideas and what appear to be false starts.

The Hard Problem in Neuroscience

Here’s an impossible ques­tion:
What’s a thought?

The com­fort­able answer is that thoughts are aggreg­ates of clean elec­tric­al pulses trav­el­ling across syn­apses in a com­plex net­work of neurons.

The more uncom­fort­able answer is that we don’t know.

Thoughts seem to be the build­ing blocks of con­scious­ness — and we know noth­ing about con­scious­ness. We don’t even know wheth­er it exists or not.

Transferring thoughts in the form of lan­guage will likely stay a sci­ence-fic­tion idea for a long time. Brain pro­cessing and human memory stor­age might be very dif­fer­ent beasts com­pared to how our com­puters are being built today.

Consciousness is the hard prob­lem of neur­os­cience, it’s the hard prob­lem of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, and it’s the hard prob­lem of human tech­no­lo­gic­al inter­faces, too.

The work­around for neur­os­cience is to con­tin­ue to learn more. The work­around for AI is to assume that con­scious­ness is an illu­sion and keep improv­ing vari­ous sys­tems’ capabilities.

And the work­around for neur­al con­nectiv­ity seems to be tri­al and error:

Connect brains over the inter­net and invest­ig­ate how neuro­plastic our brains can adapt to each other.

Read also: The Human API: Enter the Cybernetic Resistance

Sharing (Brainwaves) is Caring

As a fan and long-time user of brain​.fm, I’d be par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in new types of brain­wave-shar­ing applications.

It’s con­ceiv­able to expect spe­cif­ic effects from neuro­plas­ti­city — it might be pos­sible for human brains to find new forms of “intu­it­ive communication.” 

If we can learn to detect and dis­tin­guish between a wide array of sig­nals, two brains could poten­tially find a type of “Morse code” to send detailed and spe­cif­ic mes­sages to each other.

We could use com­puter-gen­er­ated brain­wave pat­terns to enhance learn­ing speed or put people in an optim­al men­tal state for a spe­cif­ic task. 

The tech­no­logy implies a severe leap in the import­ance of brain­wave data. Is this a poten­tial new fron­ti­er of data min­ing to fin­ance the evol­u­tion of Metaverse head­set technology? 

Knowing which men­tal states make people sus­cept­ible to sug­ges­tion and social net­work­ing sites with brain­wave-shar­ing com­munit­ies could offer advert­isers a new fron­ti­er of pro­gram­mat­ic advertising.

Affiliate: I use brain​.fm to get into mind states of pro­ductiv­ity, cre­ativ­ity, and relaxation.

Enter the Hivemind

If I were a bet­ting man, I’d place my money on tech­no­logy that allows humans to inter­face with each oth­er. The med­ic­al uses for elec­tron­ic impulse stim­uli are great, but the busi­ness case seems weak.

What would hive­mind tech­no­logy entail?

We could use hive­mind tech­no­logy to enhance the enjoy­ment of artist­ic per­form­ances where you can syn­chron­ise some of your exper­i­ence with the artist and the audience.

It could open the door to an enhanced form of human lan­guage, a hive­mind, where you can syn­chron­ise your brain pat­terns using technology. 

Hivemind tech­no­lo­gies will likely also be met by a tech­lash — severe chal­lenges regard­ing leg­al­ity and ethics.

On a more philo­soph­ic­al level, we might also be forced to ask ourselves: 

PR Resource: How AI Will Impact PR