The Hive Mind

Kevin Kelly is an interesting guy. I say this because I sort of came across this game Pong. Yeah. … Pong. Not Pong the 1972 way but the new, 21st century style, Flash 8 and all. Thing about this Pong is .. it’s also a massively multiplayer online game. Meaning literally hundreds of people can play the same game of Pong at the same time. How? Go check it out. You use only the mouse and nothing else (no need to click even).

The reason I find Kevin Kelly interesting in this Pong-context is that he wrote a book about this kind of behaviour, and in its second chapter, he wrote about a guy named Loren Carpenter, who has had great influence on the history of computer graphics (including that used in a small CG movie production company named Pixar Animation Studios) and kind of founded the idea of an anonymous, collective consciousness controlling when he decided at a conference 15 years ago to use his 5000-man audience in a strange, yet wonderfully simplistic and brilliant experiment. A little like Pong, he made them fly a flight simulator together, half the crowd controlling the plane’s rotation around its lateral axis and the other half the longitudal axis. Here’s a few sentences from the chapter about what happened:

“There is something both delicious and ludicrous about the notion of having the passengers of a plane collectively fly it.[...]As the 5,000 conference participants begin to take down their plane for landing, the hush in the hall is ended by abrupt shouts and urgent commands.[...]On the way up the plane rolls a bit. And then rolls a bit more. At some magical moment, the same strong thought simultaneously infects five thousand minds: “I wonder if we can do a 360?[...]As the horizon spins dizzily, 5,000 amateur pilots roll a jet on their first solo flight. It was actually quite graceful. They give themselves a standing ovation.”

It reminds me of the story about an American scientist who cultivated a handful of brain cells in a petridish, hooked some electrodes to it and made it fly an aircraft in a flight simulator – in case you forgot, I also wrote about that here. Sick and perverted, you say? Useless and diminuating for mankind as a whole, you say? Not at all. The purpose is to learn more about how our minds work when learning, and how we can learn things faster. So it is quite the opposite from useless.

In any case, consider this video in comparison to the two examples above. It supposedly depicts the first ever fully computerized landing of a wide-body aircraft.

All this relates to what is called emergent behaviour, which in turn is related to AI and distributed AI and is quite hard to explain and comprehend. According to Kevin Kelly, the distribution of e.g. a change of direction for a single bird in a flock of birds can take place in as little as 1/70th of a second per bird, which is much faster than the average response time of said bird. Thus, emergence happens on some deeper, inexplicable level of conscience, be it that of people, ducks, computers – or ratty brain cells