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The Hive Mind: Rebirth or the End of Humanity?
Will the innovations brought by converging
technologies for improving human performance augment or eliminate humans?
Without any doubt, mechanization brings advantages. If nothing else,
mechanization eliminates human error by eliminating jobs. That is the purpose of
mechanization. It brings down the size of payrolls while it improves the quantity
and quality of production and reduces the unit-cost of production. Robots don't
take coffee breaks. They don't go on strike and are always on the job on Blue
Mondays. They don't take sick-leave and they don't even talk back to the boss or ever
give him the finger.
The only reason why mechanization has never yet eliminated people —
other than that machines were designed, produced and used for the large-scale killing of
people in "military" actions or in genocidal exterminations — is because nobody has so far made a serious
effort to mechanize humans, but that is now changing. Government agencies in the
U.S., in Japan and in Europe are hard at work to create a hive mind and hope to have it
working by the end of the 21st century.
With knowledge no longer encapsulated in individuals, the
distinction between individuals and the entirety of humanity would blur. Think
Vulcan mind-meld. We would perhaps become more of a hive mind — an enormous,
single, intelligent entity.
— Converging Technologies
for Improving Human Performance [1]
The U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department
of Commerce and their allies in Japan and Europe hope to bring about that ultimate goal,
to promote and establish a global hive mind by the end of the 21st century. They
posit that not only is that goal feasible but also that it is quite likely to be achieved
during the course of this century.
The process they use is to converge efforts in the fields of nanotechnology,
biotechnology, information technology, human cognition and social sciences by giving them
a common goal, the creation of electronic brain-to-brain and machine-to-brain interfaces,
the creation of built-in brain- and body-enhancers.
The aim is to create artificial intelligences that will logically and
eventually merge into one single super-intelligence. The new intelligence, perhaps a
hybrid of human and machine thought, will ostensibly be able to give immortality to
humans. If thoughts and conscience can be transmitted electronically, they can also
be stored electronically – theoretically indefinitely.
The new intelligence or hive mind will live in and by means of the Internet
and be tightly and directly interconnected with manufacturing processes for the production
of consumer goods and with processes that will monitor, control, improve and optimize its
existence and functioning.
The government- or government-funded agencies collaborating on creating the
hive mind as of now chose the abbreviation NBICS (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno-Socio) to
name their combined global efforts, although in some variations of that
acronym the S (for Socio) is written small or has been left off
entirely, which is a bit of a give-away.
Not only will the hive mind have been brought to life by
the end of this century, it will offer the lure of immortality, enhanced body functions
and vastly improved brain power for all those who join it, giving them virtually instantaneous
communication with one another and making them potentially unimaginably powerful. That
what makes us human and what comprises mankind, e. g.: individual personalities, will then
no longer exist.
There will no longer be the need to feel pain, hunger, lust and pride.
Gone, too, will be the need for humans to reproduce sexually, and they will no longer
require material possessions.
How can that vision possibly fail? After all, it will save the globe,
and the proponents of that vision insist that the end of mankind by transforming it into
the hive mind is the only way by which the globe can be saved.
Mack White (in Television
and the Hive Mind) warns, though, that a hive mind is without fail
ruled by a queen. That is true of the ants, the termites and the bees, but it may be
that the hive mind will become so totally and tightly integrated that it will
be the queen
and nothing else. It will have no use for soldiers or armies, for politicians,
administrators and workers. All work necessary to maintain itself, to bring about
the elimination of mankind and to save the globe, will be done by machines that it will
control directly without human intervention. Therefore mankind will be neither
needed nor wanted. Mankind will be replaced. Mack White's article drew my attention to the U.S.
Government report Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance.[1] When I first read his commentary, I saw that he was
telling the truth about the rapidly progressing evolution of propaganda strategies and
tactics. At first I had misgivings about Mack White's claim that the ultimate goal
is to achieve not only a hive-mind mentality for mankind but to transform mankind into a
hive mind in spirit and in body. I thought that, surely, he had chosen the
expression hive mind because he had taken the view of a science fiction writer in
describing a hypothetical concept.
After I downloaded the report Converging Technologies and began to
read it, I soon saw that I had assessed his commentary wrongly and that Mack White is
absolutely and totally correct in every aspect of it.
The tool that will be used for the creation of the global hive mind is miniaturization
of data processing devices by bringing the size of data storage elements down to the
molecular level. The principle to be used for data storage will be to alter the
orientation of the spin of individual electrons, to switch each on and off by altering
its
orientation, and thereby to make it possible to have electronic data processing devices
in which the smallest components are the size of individual molecules and only a few nanometers or less apart. Thereby it
may be feasible to reduce the size of computers with processing power equal to the human
brain to a size that will theoretically be smaller than the human brain.
These computers will not only be super-small, their data storage and
processing capacity will be vastly greater than that of super computers. Moreover,
these super-small, super-powerful super computers will be super-fast, about a thousand
times faster than the human brain.
The next logical step is to use these super-small computers for the storage
of some or all of the knowledge of individual people. After that it becomes an
inevitable progression to electronically link the "minds" so stored, thereby
joining them into a hive mind. Through that the knowledge of individual
"minds" becomes accessible to all other stored "minds". The
consequence of that will be that individual "minds" can gain access to any
portion or all of the knowledge stored in the hive mind, but why stop there?
Theoretically, the power of the hive mind to use and process data will be unprecedented
and of unimaginably large proportions, quality and speed.
The wish and the will to convert mankind to a hive mind exists. Moreover,
powerful government agencies and government-funded research laboratories are hard at work
to make that wish into reality by the end of this very century. It is a logical
progression in evolution guided by man's- and not God's will.
The developed nations ignore and even abrogated God. In some
instances they outlawed respect and all mention of Him, which not even
Stalin or Hitler had brought to pass. Still, humans have a
fundamental yearning for God. Even those who hate Him prove through their hatred of
Him that God exists – never mind whether anyone lives with or by God's rules, feels
that God's rules are arbitrary human inventions or thinks that a better human existence
can be created by abolishing what he thinks is a useless, archaic, superstitious concept.
As soon as mankind abolishes God, the deeply-felt fundamental human yearning
for God will nevertheless then require that mankind put itself into the place of God
– not only on Earth but also within our galaxy.[2]
Yes, the galaxy, as the proponents of the hive mind propose in essence that it is mankind's duty to
become a hive mind for two reasons, to save the globe and to conquer the galaxy.
Moreover, they say that without mankind becoming a hive mind, Earth will perish and with it
all of mankind, and that mankind has no practical method at its disposal by which to begin
the conquest of our galaxy unless mankind metamorphoses into a hive mind.
It seems that a better title for the U.S. Government report on the state and goal of
the effort to transform mankind into a hive mind would be Making Mankind into
God.
Once mankind has become a hive mind, individual humans will no
longer exist. The authors of Converging Technologies state that pain,
hunger, lust and pride will no longer exist, but they are not going far enough in their
description of the hive mind. Also gone will be love and respect by fellow humans
for each other. Gone will be the capacity even to hate one another. However,
none of that will matter very much because when the hive mind exists mankind will be dead,
and God will still be the all-powerful creator.
Mankind's suicide through becoming a hive mind, too, will be proof of
His existence. There can be no life without God. Mankind's denial of God is
mankind's death. It is not a question of whether but when that death will occur, and
the following excerpts for Converging Technologies contain the time table.
New
professions for humans and new roles for machines may arise to mediate between all this
complexity and the individual person. Art, music, and literature may attain new levels of
subtlety and sophistication, enhancing the mental qualities of life and the innate human
appreciation for beauty. [3]
That statement appears to be based on- and
contains faulty logic. If, as the authors state on page 165 of their report,
personalities may no longer exist on account of the inability of individuals to experience
pain, hunger, lust and pride, would it then not follow that then the capability to wish
for pleasure or even to feel it no longer exists, and that to cater to it is then no
longer necessary? In the hive mind, pleasure is as much of a nuisance as is pain.
Then again, the quoted paragraph uses the modifier may, twice, and
therefore it seems that the concession is made that quite likely in the hive mind the
inconveniences of pain, pleasure, love and all of the other personal experiences and
emotions that make us individuals will no longer exist. Therefore, personalities
will no longer be needed or even wanted. Far out? Consider what the authors of
the report think will be possible in that respect:
Understand
how the human perception of mind arises from the brain. Formalize in neural network models
operating on traditional hardware. Thus, intelligences akin to humans will reside in the
Internet. These intelligences, not being physically limited, will merge and transform
themselves in novel ways. The notion of discrete intelligence will disappear. [4]
"Intelligences akin to humans"?
Akin may mean nothing anymore. The hive mind intelligence will not be mankind and
quite possibly not even be kind to man.
Why complicate the design of the hive mind if a
far simpler design will suffice? In the end, the purpose of the hive mind is to
serve the Earth Goddess and to do that by eliminating the physical existence of mankind
with all of its needs and greed. If the hive mind residing in the Internet does not
manifest itself as individual personalities, what single-minded objective will it have,
what goals will it seek, and how will it see itself? Once it is aware of itself and
in control of manufacturing processes, will it feel compassion for mankind or see mankind
as a potentially dangerous competitor or perhaps as a danger to Earth that needs to be
eliminated?
When the "[Internet] intelligences begin to merge and transform
themselves in novel ways", what will they see as the purpose of their existence?
Can mankind control how the hive mind sees that purpose and what that purpose will
be? That seems impossible. Let's not forget that the intent is to make the
hive mind vastly superior to mankind. The "human" cognition and
communication that is to be expanded will ultimately be no longer human but that of an
artificial intelligence.
Once mankind no longer exists in its current
physical and spiritual form, would it not be a logical conclusion to limit the design of
the hive mind to serving only its own purpose and not that of mankind? It seems to
be quite obvious from the report that Mankind is the problem, and that to eliminate it in
its totality – even to prevent all of its manifestations in the hive mind –
should and will be the ultimate goal.
Besides, to eliminate mankind is an objective that is much more easily
achieved than to construct an electronic simulacrum of it, especially within the
limitations under which the hive-mind project-team labours. They admit that they
don't understand what comprises a personality. How can they then hope to understand
mankind? How can they possibly hope to create a global hive mind that successfully
represents the complexity of mankind if they don't even understand what comprises the
personality of an individual human?
No, it is quite apparent that the easiest way out of those complications is
to create a servant for Gaea that no longer resembles or even cares for mankind at all.
From the report:
| Table
3. History of some very significant augmentations to human performance: Improving our
ability to collectively improve ourselves (see also Spohrer 2002)[2] |
| Generations |
Several Key Advancements
(human kind, tools and technology, communication) |
| -m |
Cell, body and brain development |
| -
100,000 |
Old Stone Age (Paleolithic), Homo
Erectus, speech |
| -10,000 |
Homo Sapiens, making tools |
| -500 |
Mesolithic, creating art |
| -400 |
Neolithic, agricultural products,
writing, libraries |
| -40 |
Universities |
| -24 |
Printing |
| -16 |
Renaissance in S&T, accurate
clocks |
| -10 |
Industrial revolution |
| -5 |
Telephone |
| -4 |
Radio |
| -3 |
TV |
| -2 |
Computers |
| -1 |
Microbiology, Internet |
| 0 |
Reaching at the building blocks of
matter (nanoscience)
Biotechnology products
Global connection via Internet; GPS/sensors for navigation |
| ½ |
Unifying science and converging
technologies from the nanoscale
Nanotechnology products
Improving human performance advancements
Global education and information infrastructure |
| 1 |
Converging technology products for
improving human physical and mental performance (new products and services, brain
connectivity, sensory abilities, etc.)
Societal and business reorganization |
| n |
Evolution transcending human cell,
body, and brain? |
|
Certainly, the report is brimful with enticing prospects, packaged in alluring concepts,
such as enhancing our lives, such as the idea that NBICS has the capacity to enable us to
obtain things and capabilities that we only dreamed about, or that it can help disabled
people, or both. For example:
It is
understood that NBIC should be used in a way that diminishes the discrimination against
disabled people, advances their acceptance and integration into society, and increases
their quality of life.
....NBIC has the potential
to increase the quality of life of disabled people by allowing for alternative modes of
transportation. One technique that could potentially increase quality of life
immensely would be mobile teleportation devices. Teleportation would be linked to global
positioning devices (see [link])
so that someone could just teleport themselves where they have to go.
[5]
Why not? Firstly, it would be political suicide for anyone to oppose the creation
of tools that will improve the lives of the disabled. Secondly, it would seem that
there are very few people who wouldn't want to avail themselves of teleportation, even if
it is only in virtual reality. The real thing, such as in "Beam me up,
Scotty," will likely require far more time than we can ever hope to find.[6] It does not seem possible that teleportation can be
designed and put into operation without having the hive mind doing at the very least the
major portion of the design work required for that. Perhaps the hive-mind, with its
independent, vastly superior logic will decide that teleportation is a waste of bandwidth,
resources and, moreover, a luxury that mankind no longer needs because it did or will
vanish anyway on account of mass suicide.
The hive mind: will it bring the rebirth or the end of humanity? That depends on
the answers to the questions raised in this article or on the answers to similar questions
raised elsewhere.
The powers wish to construct a global hive mind, but they also wish to reduce the world
population to pre-Columbian levels, apparently both in an effort to save Gaea. It
proved considerably more difficult than anticipated to reduce the world population at the
desired rate to the desired number of 300 million to one billion people. Still,
current UN population statistics indicate that population decline is now a stark and
frightening reality for all of the developed nations and for a large and growing number of
UN member nations.
UN population projections indicate that by 2150 the world population will
have declined to 3.5 billion people. Nevertheless, the U.S. NSF and U.S. DoC report
pays no attention to that projection. Instead, it compares the
closed environment of the Earth to that of a microbial community growing
in a Petri dish and shows images of a Petri dish and Earth,
side-by-side, with a superimposed graph of exponential population growth
and catastrophic collapse.
Figure
D.2. Microbial communities growing within a confined space (here shown in a petri
dish, left) have a cautionary tale to tell: overuse and/or unbalanced use of resources
leads to build up of toxins, shortage of food, overpopulation, and death. [7]
Now, that is propaganda in action. Even Goebbels
could not have done better: "Create a hive mind to solve the
(non-existent) population explosion in the world, or we will all perish through
catastrophic collapse of the population and/or environment." No
mention is made of the fact that the world is producing more food than its people can
consume. The report does not mention that farming in the developed nations has
become a non-viable industry due to lack of sufficient demand for its products in the international
market.
Currently there seems to be not a single demographer in the world who ventured a guess
as to whether the current world population trend toward rapid
decline will level off or perhaps reverse itself. Is there no one who cares or dares
to suggest that the hive mind could be put to use in solving the problem of the enforced
death of all of mankind within the next few centuries? How will the hive mind feel
about that, and what will it do? Will it nurture mankind to new and better levels of
awareness and existence, or will it merely become a faster and better alternative for the
final solution for the mankind problem, cleaning Gaea of mankind?
In the meantime, birth rates keep
falling and suicide rates keep rising.
However, why should anyone busy with the important business of developing the hive mind
trouble himself with that?
Lower or virtually non-existent birth rates are
 said to be good for women's
life-style choices, even though on account of falling birth rates social safety nets are
collapsing and cause hundreds of millions of elderly women to experience neglect and
poverty.
The high and rising suicide rates
affect primarily and almost exclusively men and boys, and who would want to worry
about them? Besides, if enough people kill themselves because of the deconstruction
of our families, love, respect and other social niceties, then there will be that much
less and perhaps nothing left to do for the hive mind to detract it from catering to Gaea,
and that will be a good thing, won't it?
Those who kill themselves now because they experience the loss of love, hope
and their purpose in life under rapidly deteriorating social conditions won't trouble the
hive mind with the need to be exterminated later.
We are made to think that nothing should interfere with the business of the new god
being created, and nothing does, as of now. Presently we all (or most of us)
contribute our taxes of whom a large amount of money is allocated to pay for the
ammunition and the programs with which we all will eventually be eliminated. When we
no longer let God guide us on the path to the end of our lives, what will?
The technological ideologues and would-be-creators are not very
likely able to bring about actual teleportation. To teleport one human being at the
relatively coarse resolution of determining where every atom in a body is located with
respect to every other atom in the body from one place to another would require an
interval of about 100 million centuries at fibre-optic speeds. Before that process
is finished for just a single individual, I'm sure, we will have to worry about a lot of
other problems that will become far more urgent. [6]
Nevertheless, the people who would transform mankind into God will certainly
try, and they will demand that we pay for it all while they expect to make a good living
being unsuccessful in trying to do the impossible — all the while claiming that
throwing more money into the bottomless pit they are digging will help to bring them
closer to achieving their goal.
However, considering that mankind has come awfully close to acting as if it
were a hive mind already, the futile efforts of the would-be-creators will most certainly
have the result that we will come as close to being a hive mind as is humanly possible.
For that we have a long way to go. We have not seen the worst yet. That
is still to come.
P.S. 2011 04 03: It has been a little over eight years since I wrote
that. I read it through very carefully and found that as of now
there is no reason for revising the opinions I expressed, except for
some very minor edits to polish a couple of sentences.
This morning I listened to the radio and heard part of a
discussion with Dr. Charles Higgins from The Department of Neuroscience
at the University of Arizona. He basically appears to be a
proponent of much of what the preceding commentary targets, but he seems
to have his feet a bit more firmly on the ground than the US National
Science Foundation and the US Department of Commerce do. I gathered from that discussion that we are still a long way off from creating an artificial intelligence that
comes close to competing with human abilities, let alone equal them.
Some of the impressions I gained from listening this morning will be
covered in this
blog posting at Dads
& Things. |
___________________
Converging Technologies for Improving Human
Performance (pre-publication on-line version), June 2002, U.S. National Science
Foundation, U.S. Department of Commerce, pp. 164, 165
PDF
File (4.7 MB) Ibid., p. 150, THE CONSEQUENCES OF FULLY
UNDERSTANDING THE BRAIN, Warren Robinett Ibid., p. 19, Overview Ibid., p. 158, ACCELERATING CONVERGENCE OF NANOTECHNOLOGY,
BIOTECHNOLOGY AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, Larry Todd Wilson, IEEE (last paragraph in
the column headed "COULD BE") Ibid., p. 240, IMPROVING QUALITY OF LIFE OF DISABLED PEOPLE USING
CONVERGING TECHNOLOGIES, G.
Wolbring, U. Calgary, and R. Golledge, UCSB (second item under "The vision") Many people have sensibly discussed teleportation. Here is
a sample of their conclusions. Converging Technologies, p. 265, MAKING SENSE OF THE
WORLD: CONVERGENT TECHNOLOGIES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, Jill Banfield, University
of California, Berkeley -
Is the world overpopulated?
If all of the world's people were located in the Province of Alberta (just a
touch smaller in area than the State of Texas) and each were to have an equal
share of all of the land in Alberta, then each of the world's people would have
98.6m2 of land to live on.
Assuming that the average household consists of three people, a family of three
would have enough space (3,184 ft2) for a moderately-sized house and
a garden large enough to grow some of the food consumed by the family.
- Alberta land area: 661,565 km2, 255,541 miles2
- World population: 6,706,993,152 (Source:
CIA World Factbook, July 2008 est.)
It is obvious that the world's population density will be
the controlling factor. Is that a problem? Will people any time soon
be standing on each other's shoulders?
How can the world be overpopulated if it is possible to fit the world
population, fairly comfortably, into a province the size of Alberta or a state
the size of Texas, even if we divide the whole population into families of
three and give each a bungalow and a good-sized garden to boot?
The following table list a number of nations, ranked by their population
densities.
Does anyone seeing those numbers still think that the world is overpopulated?
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If you have concerns about these and other issues related to the condition of
seniors, visit, contact and perhaps even join:
SUN — Seniors United Now
The up- and coming, rapidly-growing advocacy organization
for seniors (55 years and over) in Alberta
There are in the order of about half a million or more people of age 55 and
over in Alberta. If all of them were to join SUN, they would become the most
powerful advocacy organization in Alberta; and seniors would no longer be robbed
of their comforts and otherwise ignored.
At the price of one package of cigarettes seniors will be able to
gain a voice that will be heard by a government that otherwise can and will take
from seniors what they worked for all their life to enjoy in their old age.
If you are concerned about how seniors are affected by the
planned,
systematic destruction of our families and society, a search
at google.com (for elderly OR seniors OR grandparent OR grandfather OR
grandmother site:http://fathersforlife.org) will provide you with the links
to about 80 web pages at Fathers for Life that will be of interest to you.
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