document updated 16 years ago, on Jul 19, 2007
I have this sense that increasing collaboration by large groups of people will increasingly move
society towards a Borg/hive
mind without them necessarily realizing it (eg. Wikipedia is but one step in that direction). One key challenge with this, however, is the development of ways for larger groups of people
to collaborate as effectively as possible, while avoiding typical problems/failures that current large-scale collaborations have:
groupthink,
decision-by-committee,
and other things I believe are failures of large coprorate decisions.
(granted, Borg-like systems typically involve constant moment-to-moment interaction with others' thoughts... but the increasing use of nerve and brain implants may move us even in that direction eventually. Going further, members of the hive mind may be so integrated so as to lose a sense of individuality... due to societal standards, it's not clear if/when that would happen, but the technological part could definitely become a reality)
This sums it up really well:
What would it mean for a group of people to be "intelligent"? For instance, if a single superhuman intelligence had access to all the knowledge and resources of a company like IBM or General Motors, what would it do? What strategies would it pursue? How quickly could it respond to changes in the marketplace? How productively could it use factories and money? How profitable would it be? And-most importantly-how closely could we approximate the behavior of this imaginary superhuman intelligence by cleverly connecting real people and computers?
Possible enhanced collaboration techniques include:
See also