While waiting at the bus station, I had nothing to do but think.
The bus was scheduled for x:45, and the only thing I was certain about was that it wouldn't arrive on time. Contrary to what statistics would suggest, the odds of the bus showing up seem to improve the further you are from its scheduled time. It was x:43, and experience told me the chance of the bus arriving was going down, not up.
So while I sat there laughing at the odds (what else could I do?), a thought struck me: AI, at least the big models, is trained on all the knowledge that's out there; or at least a huge share of what humanity has written down.
There's a lot of debate right now about using copyrighted material to train AI. But my mind wandered somewhere else.
I love sci-fi movies. One recurring theme is the alien species with a hive-mind: they think collectively. The moment one of them learns something, it's as if they all know it.
And it hit me. By training AI on all the knowledge we've ever recorded, we may have built the closest thing our species has come to a hive-mind.
And honestly? It's kind of wonderful. I brainstorm with AI. I tell it what I'm planning and ask what it knows. We debate. We weigh the pros and cons of different approaches. Sometimes I'm wrong. And believe it or not, sometimes the AI is wrong too. I don't just mean hallucinations. Sometimes its reasoning is off, and I have to point it out.
But that back-and-forth is the hive-mind. I'm not just talking to an AI. I'm essentially talking to every human being, today and in the past, whose work the AI was trained on.
That's the beauty of this hive-mind: it isn't limited to the knowledge of people alive today. AI is trained on old books too. So this is a hive-mind of humanity, both present and past.
I'm not sure whether to be excited or unsettled. For now, I'm enjoying it.
But there's talk of putting chips in the human brain, literally hooking your brain up to the internet. Once that interface becomes reality, we'll already have the rest of the hive-mind in place. So we'd practically achieve the hive-mind exactly as the sci-fi movies show it.
And I'm honestly not sure how I feel about that chip. Part of me is fascinated: what would it look like, how would it work? But part of me worries about the ethical questions we'd have to face once it's ready. And let's be honest, humanity doesn't have a great track record when it comes to ethics.
It was a nice thought. Both fun and unsettling. Let's see what future has for us!
And the bus? It arrived 30+ minutes late, missing even its next scheduled departure time, in case you were still wondering.