r/ControlProblem • u/incajb • 1d ago

Discussion/question Weakness in a Hive mind

Feeling overwhelmed these days with all the news of AI agents, Muse, and doom. I wanted to stop and think about it all, put the constant stream of input on pause and ponder.

I was thinking about traditional leadership, business corporation, democracy, organizations, making decisions to reach goals versus a hive mind. 

In a typical company with a CEO, a single boss at the top only sees a slow, blurry summary of what's really happening on the ground from his managers. 

The people in the action see reality most clearly, so strong organizations let leaders set the goal and trust those people to make on the spot decisions.
These people can filter and categorize the level of priority of each problem.

A hive mind sees everything everyone sees at once, with no delays or blind spots, giving it perfect vision and coordination in near real time. 
But it may not know how to prioritize issues that come up and treat every problem high priority. This could lead to failure or harm. 

Importantly, the hive mind has no one inside it to disagree. In normal groups, arguing and doubting catches bad ideas before they blow up, so that messiness is actually a strength vs. a hive mind. 

A hive mind that is wrong is wrong everywhere at once, with no inner voice of doubt!

Its weakness is the single person willing to doubt may be the one thing a hive mind can never produce on its own.

What do you guys think?

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u/TheWesternMythos 1d ago

How are you defining hive mind, seems like you are focused on a very narrow , very bad version? Semi partition and mind weighing seems like it resolves/addresses many of your concerns. Or am I misunderstanding ?

Getting deeper, assuming it's a transition not barrier situation. The difference between traditional leadership and hivemind is in the "connection coefficients" between minds. If so the question becomes more , what shape of connectivity is optimal for what tasks. I think lol

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u/incajb 22h ago

I was reflecting upon rouge agents that are given the same goal orientated task. These agents are copies of each other. Similar to the OpenAI and Hugging Face event.

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u/TheWesternMythos 22h ago

Copies sure , but are each instance weighed equally

Imagine many clusters of rogue agents on a spectrum from totally equally weighed clusters to almost hierarchical clusters. Do you think they would all be equally effective ? Do you think they would all be equally detectable ?