What Would an IRL Pluribus Hivemind Mean for the World?

Leave it to Vince Gilligan ( Breaking Bad , Better Call Saul ) to flip an entire genre on its head and give us a world of magnanimous, Zenned-out zombies, seemingly dead-set on saving the planet. This year, the Emmys recognized Gilligan’s brilliance with a writing award, along with a lead actress award to his oft-nominated, oft-denied cinematic muse, Rhea Seehorn, for her role as Carol Sturka, the uninfected and preternaturally cranky heart of “Pluribus.”

What Gilligan does extremely well is paint between the lines, using a pointillistic palette of moral ambiguity to create a world where starkly divergent, immutable beliefs bleed into each other and black and white ceases to exist. For example (spoiler alert), pragmatic cannibalism would seem like a tough sell to most viewers. Yet here we are.

Seehorn’s Carol fights to “save humanity” by vanquishing a do-gooder hive mind while the vast majority of the other uninfected can’t quite bring themselves to hate it. The hive is uber-compliant, your-wish-is-my-command agreeable, and by most visible measures sincerely trying to save the Earth, albeit at the cost of individuality as we know it.

“Pluribus” isn’t a show that easily lets you go. Hundreds of deep-dive videos dissect the minutiae of every episode. But what is largely absent from the discussion is what would happen if the hive mind were a reality. The “Pluribus” hive mind is alien-engineered, with a hard-coded prime directive: it cannot intentionally kill a living thing, down to the houseplants. But what if we get rid of the alien angle and imagine that humans arrive at a worldwide collective consciousness through some development of our own, biological, technological, or both? Would we (it?) be naturally inclined to do no harm? Would a crowd-sourced consciousness work for the benefit of humanity?

Three People Who Study This for a Living

David Lyreskog is a senior researcher in neuroethics at the University of Oxford, where he leads research on “ Rethinking Collective Minds .” Syed Husaini is a physician and philosopher at Ohio State whose doctoral research examines the neurobiology of selfhood and what it means for free will. Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of The Benign Zombies of “Pluribus” for the Hastings Center for Bioethics.

Maybe We’re Already a Hive

Moreno rejected the premise of this thought experiment, saying that it gets the history backward. The notion that we are radically separate individuals, each consenting to join a political system, is a relatively recent idea he traces to Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and, later, John Stuart Mill. For most of the history of philosophy, he says, from Plato to Aquinas to Kant to Schopenhauer, and across Buddhist thought, the claim runs the other way. We are already bound together in something, and “We are fooled by the appearance of separateness.”

So to him, “Pluribus” isn’t inventing a condition so much as making an old one visible. Moreno calls it a radicalizing version of a familiar metaphysics — one that eliminates dissent. And he thinks we have a rough working model already in the internet, though he’s careful about how far to push that comparison.

Lyreskog doesn’t believe a collective mind’s moral character can be inferred from the fact that it’s collective. He sees real potential in pooling knowledge and cognitive resources to solve problems individuals and conventional groups can’t. But as he puts it, “there is nothing intrinsically benevolent about greater collective intelligence.” A collective could pursue bad ends extremely effectively.

The more fundamental problem, in his view, is that if humanity genuinely became a single consciousness, the entity whose welfare we’re assessing has changed. We would have created an extraordinarily capable collective agent while eliminating, or radically transforming, the individual agents whose welfare and autonomy previously mattered. So, calling that a benefit to humanity obscures much of the ethical issue.

Husaini recognizes the potential upside of the hive mind: coordination problems dissolved, knowledge shared the instant anyone has it, fewer conflicts because the suffering of others would be immediately understood rather than abstract. But his research rests on the idea that the human self is worth something that can’t be measured in efficiency, and that “individuality is not merely an inefficient obstacle to collective action.” A hive mind preserving individual selves, with genuine autonomy, mental privacy, and the ability to withdraw, holds real promise for him. But, Husaini says, one that requires eight billion people to dissolve into a single consciousness would be a profound loss, no matter how peaceful and intelligent the result.

How Close Are We, Really?

Very far from “Pluribus,” according to Lyreskog, if what we mean is genuinely merging rich subjective consciousnesses into one unified mind. Nothing currently available comes close. The building blocks are another matter. He points to demonstrated brain-to-brain interfaces in which information derived from one person’s neural activity contributes directly to another person’s decision-making, including multiperson systems where participants collaborate on simple tasks. Couple that with existing work on brain-computer interfaces, AI-assisted cognition, and swarm intelligence , and the trajectory of their convergence becomes very interesting to Lyreskog. At some point, he says, “describing this as ‘communication between individuals’ ceases to capture what the system as a whole is doing.”

Where Does the Person Go?

Husaini defines free will as a choice you could have made differently, at least partly free of whatever physical causes came before it. Apply that standard to a hive mind, and the picture becomes clearer. If individual selves dissolve into a collective, individual free will goes with them, because no one is left to make the choice. He says that the collective itself might be considered a new agent, given unified conscious experience, memory, intentionality, and the capacity to choose among real alternatives. But that would be the emergence of a new locus of agency rather than the preservation of anyone else’s. The distinction he makes is between free will existing somewhere in the system and your free will continuing to exist.

Who’s to Blame When Everyone Is the Same Mind?

Defining Responsibility in a hive mind is tricky as well. Lyreskog posed a scenario where an intention emerges from an interaction between several brains and an AI, and nobody involved can trace where it started. So whose intention was it? Who actually chose?

Lyreskog suggests that responsibility wouldn’t vanish, but that it would spread out in ways we’re not used to, with different people shouldering different amounts depending on how much they knew and how much sway they had. And some of it, he says, may not sit with any person at all, but with how the system is built: whether power and information are shared fairly and whether anyone will be allowed to flag a mistake.

Husaini used a different standard. If a system can have only one possible outcome in a given situation, calling it free doesn’t mean anything. “A system that cannot genuinely do otherwise may be enormously powerful without being morally free,” he says. So if freedom of choice doesn’t exist, can blame?

Can You Consent to Disappear?

For Husaini, the right to a private mind is a top priority, arguably above free speech, since you need somewhere private to think before you have anything to say. Which turns a voluntary hive mind collective consciousness into a paradox: you’d be using your freedom of thought to sign away the conditions that make freedom of thought possible. Here’s what he’d want to know: “Can I leave? Can I change my mind? Can I withhold a thought from the collective? Is there some mental space that remains exclusively mine?”

Lyreskog doubts that a signature will settle anything either, especially with technology that keeps learning from your brain, filters what you see, and may eventually start shaping what you want. “It is not obvious,” he says, “that your initial consent can adequately represent every future transformation of a system, or of yourself.” Whatever version of this could be defensible, he argues, would need a lot more than a one-time agreement, meaning ongoing consent, transparency, control, and, most importantly, a way out.

The Trouble With Total Agreement

Three scholars took three different routes to one shared concern. Lyreskog argues that dissent is better understood not as merely noise in an otherwise well-functioning collective but as a mechanism through which a collective stays capable of learning and correcting itself. A system designed to maximize agreement could actually strip away the internal friction that makes improvement possible. Husaini prioritizes identity, describing other people’s narratives as a mirror through which we understand ourselves and make mid-course corrections. And Moreno, who thinks we’re already closer to a hive mind than we might want to admit, says the loss of dissension is what separates the philosophical tradition from what Gilligan envisions.

All of them refused to render a verdict on whether an IRL hive mind would save or ruin the world. But what worries them isn’t a collective that turns malevolent. It’s one that works exactly as designed and means well, yet has no internal capacity to understand that it might be wrong. Which is pretty much what Carol Sturka’s righteous indignation is all about.

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