How Far Is the World to Connect to a Hive?

What is a hive? The home of bees or a colony of ants. In a hive, every bee or ant has a role, which it performs without questioning, hesitation or aspirations to higher positions, and without conflicts with other "members" of the hive.

The life of any bee or ant of the hive is monotonous, taken separately, and similar to the lives of every other creature with the same role in the hive. However, when we look at the result of their combined effort, the hive thrives.

At the beginning of the industrial age, and a good while during it, people worked in factories being hyper-focused on one task only, to improve the speed at which products were being delivered.

Then machines came and it turned out they did a better job, so many people lost their jobs because of this development.

Now we are taught every person is unique and we should embrace our differences. Practically the opposite of the policy of fitting in from the industrial age.

In a hive, individual differences are not permitted, only roles, because the notion of individual doesn't exist.

Therefore, how would a human hive be like?

The science-fiction example comes from the Star Trek TV series, but it isn't very consistent. The negative character is called the Borg Collective, which has an incredible power of adaptation and assimilation of new technologies from different species it comes in contact with.

At first, in the Next Generation series, the Borg is presented as an entity with distributed decision making processes and no leader. In later series, a central figure was introduced "to speak" for the Borg and later even to control the decision making of the hive, transforming it to a more human-like hierarchically structure.

I still have the chills when thinking of the Borg I saw as a child in Star Trek - Next Generation. As in the case of factories, computers and robots would be much better candidates to mimic a hive. In fact, there are projects based on a hive model in concept or development right now. One of them intends to explore the Mars surface from the atmosphere, using a swarm of mini bee-like drones controlled by a rover.

That doesn't mean ideas to "improve" us using the hive model don't exist.

A possibility that has been brought up more than once, is to create a sort of next generation of the internet (past IoT), that would connect people's minds directly, and therefore create the premises for finding solutions to problems much easier, by accessing directly an entire pool of expertise in every field.

People would choose when to connect to this hive and when to disconnect. Hmm, I wonder how such a reality would be? How many would make the brain implants needed to be part of this hive?

How would the decisions process be? Would the hive decisions influence their minds after participants disconnect?

The questioning line somehow brings us back to the Borg... At least in my mind.

Some strange things at the time of concept became reality in time, but I doubt our society is ready for connecting to the hive in droves, anytime soon.

Compared to the ideas I've presented you above, the mass adoption of blockchains and cryptos seems around the corner!