AI Hive Democracy, or, social networks in the next 30 years

[AI-hive democracy: social networks in the next 30 years

AI-hive democracy: social networks in the next 30 years

Mar 03, 2025

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SUMMARY: My parents and I can talk in half words because we know each other and our interests well enough to accurately predict train of thought from body language, context, and key terms. That’s all you need for high density communication at scale.*

*Hire me and I’ll make it happen <3 [in academia rn]


Shout out to the hosts & attendees of the caffeine & arguing party I was inspired by to write up my thoughts :)

Researchers, this is written informally and with all the whim and whimsy of someone who writes sci-fi for fun and debates futurism online. If something remains to be proven or discovered, consider it a creative reasoning exercise and let’s collaborate.

Yes I can be talked out of this - it is not integral to my identity although it is carried on momentum of personality (read: I like thinking about these things).

Thoughts for the Short Term:

ON COMMUNITIES

Our societies used to develop social networks based on physical proximity - the people in your town, perhaps your city or, if you become well-known, your school or state or country. Due to the internet, these networks are now based on three other factors: language (code-switching between social groups, but also UX/forum-space knowledge), ideological proximity, and the lens of¹personality (also a determinant in forum-space).²This character of person I will be referring to as ‘personality’, but also ‘beliefs’ and general ‘vibe.’

I would even go so far as to say the set of human personality are finite. While people take some unique positions, we try to maintain mutual intelligibility and largely care about the same things. ³ Most ideas are optimized in communication & interaction and as such have a minimum of two people, maximum n number of people who thought it up independently from the same premises.

I also believe a group of people or an individual can be predicted to pretty high accuracy if you account for their beliefs, common inputs, and communication styles ⁴ (>75% accuracy, some will argue 99%). The remainder matters!

ON HUMAN PROCESSING LIMITS

The brain has parsing maxima, thought to be why languages tend towards standard information rates (with dependence on shared context, shared context increasing data flow.) (I’m currently working on information compression in communication, hoping to extend into a lens of culture.) ⁵

There’s a lot of ways I could try to increase the information density I communicate at, and compress the information for you.

1. I could communicate in deeply encrypted language, but to the reader it would quickly become word salad unless you knew all of my references, by being part of all of my communities ⁶

2. I could try to maintain multiple threads of thought at once while communicating, and give you a recipe for fruit salad sprinkled into the text through metaphor. ⁷

3. I could parallel re-encode this essay into philosophy or academese, partially decrypting my language into a code-switching ideological rosetta stone, but that level of information density is more commonly known as a book.

I think it is possible to claim that the actual maxima is the speed of thought association, free thought OR goal-oriented thought. We have a small % of people in our lives who would understand what we’re saying from half-words, context, and non-verbal communication cues - deeply encrypted language, not to make implications on how you think of what you are trying to communicate in the first place.

The reason it works with these people is you know them well enough to predict how their associations came about to >75%. This sort of connection, when done to a broad audience, is rizz. ⁸ It goes in a lot of directions - when it’s done to a specific person you’re emulating, for example, it’s being an attentive listener or reader. Like my physics teacher with the heavy accent writing a complex formula in barely legible script while talking towards the whiteboard. He assigned reading with his social norms integrated into the text, after all.

ON COMMUNICATION INTERFACES

True read/write brain computer interfaces as brain chips are hazardous: hacking (free seizures! courtesy of some random person who thought it’d be funny <3) & literal infection (the brain is immune privileged for good reasons). Plus, as a bonus, it is slightly harder to manipulate your concept of your society into giving you brain damage. ⁹ An interesting topic of exploration here is if some people are more susceptible to ideology than others- like being immune-compromised from a social network influence angle. ¹⁰

Even better, we already have a lot of brain interfaces that can be hooked up to computers and trained to read/write a high volume of information. We call them the senses, and use them to mainline internet and environment into our brain daily. It’s incredible, the things you can get used to interfacing with and parsing, on an intuitive level. ¹¹ We change how we use our brains to account for external tools a lot! The best example may be the memory space of the blind, but as my dad says - and a lot of internet-raised people might identify with - I don’t memorize a lot of things, I just know where to look them up.

ON THOUGHT ASSOCIATION

Associations can be predicted from training on one individual’s behaviour & their interests & personality. Shifts in thoughts are visible on the face/body and in brain scan data. To this end, BCI chips aren’t formally necessary, although I’m sure many will use them once they don’t require massive doses of immuno-suppressants.

Users can also easily learn to display free association on the face & in tech interactions, because it’s part of how we communicate as social mammals. Like reading your friend’s body language to infer who their crush is, or figuring out who the werewolf is in Werewolf. Browsing online content impulsively/with your friends is a learned version of this - what a lot of content locks you in for hours with is identifying with the community you’re engaging with, either through existing friends sending you Content You Care About that you gotta choose the right emoji for, or though more online means such as ragebait. In order to keep you locked in, algorithms are trying to follow along with, predict, create, and categorize your whims and free associations. Before you can remember what you were thinking to pick up your phone, or what you wanted to do next.

With AR and predictive communication technology, our speed of interpersonal communication can increase to the level of whim with everyone everywhere. Google translate your meme, chatGPT your philosophical questions to strengthen your debate as someone outside of the field, interpret what that one person is saying by committee in the groupchat live, side-eye your friend on the other side of the planet faster than a gif ever can.

A society where everyone is communicating at this rate is hyper-connected and a hivemind for all intents and purposes. Can you imagine how good this speed of communication will be for your bottom line? Or your interpersonal relationships?

A friend of mine and I used to talk about using AR to walk through each other’s thought spaces, watching each other’s dreams, see the world through each other’s eyes. Which is honestly already how some people use snap, so you can see where they’re going with the spectacles.

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Long Term Thoughts:

ON ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE

An AGI would have too much data to communicate effectively to a single human being. True human-AGI conversation happens at scale. AGI to hivemind. The memory space of an AGI is just way too massive for a single human to keep up when it’s free associating, when the computational cog-sci memory people figure out how to implement that by imitating the human mind. ¹²

A society of hyper-connected socially networked individuals form a cluster. I am a node in my local social graph. My social graph is a node in a multivariable belief space. These belief-space level nodes interact and communicate a lot like people do. ¹³

At a high enough speed of communication, a content prediction AGI will function like the prefrontal cortex for the human community. If you want to know what someone is thinking, you can! Literally just download his location in the network lol have chat switch into his context bro

I think we will still have free will, not just top-down zorgswarms. The existence of free will is a good thing -without it, respectfully, the qualia appreciators are cooked. As are pretty much all variants on being alive enjoyers, I fear. ¹⁴

ON INDIVIDUAL PERSONALITY IN A HIVEMIND

Note where I said the unpredictable remainder matters a lot. This is why. The random noise of personality/free will, at a scale, is exploration of unique solutions to problems at a community level. We can be predicted as pivotal individuals for a certain ideological debate question and this answer will be amplified across the network with complete contextual fidelity and ideological localization information to the person who most disagrees¹⁵ Yes [your favourite social media algo here] does this, with [ your favourite social media here] self selection biases for media format, age, political belief, language use [academese, slang, vibes], and other social space vectors. Memes cross this barrier a bit. This self selection bias is practically fixed, and just needs integration into our broader communication system. ¹⁶

Humans and our societies become modules in the reasoning space of AGI, like the brainstem and machine code are both a connection to the prehistoric. These solution explorations will be the “choice generator” of AI expansion across the universe. We have strong opinions about our society’s growth and expansion because we value each other and our outcomes, and therefore so does anything built upon us.

Why would an AGI need us becomes like asking “why do you wake up in the morning?” - I bootload from my previous qualia instance automatically after a lil rinse down by the glia and a lil long term memory fixation. I’m what was stored and processed in my many little SSDs for hibernation and maintained through low-grade brain state dynamics, ¹⁷ to reconnect back up into a full system in the morning. ¹⁸ Think of the self not as the object, but as the motion.¹⁹

Although I’m sure Elon wants the driving society in question to be him and his clones. Competing hiveminds in a political world are a different matter altogether, and needs a book to address.

ON DEMOCRACY

This whole thing would be a maximally optimized decentralized democracy. Your concerns are addressed in your personal thinking style and unaddressed concerns are broadcast to others thinking on the subject, with information on where you’re coming from. Like a really big group chat but people don’t get overwhelmed by irrelevant noise and misunderstand less.

Fin.

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SEGUE ON FREE WILL

Yes I believe in free will

1. I independently generated an idea of quantum immortality that guides my concept of the self vs choice while trying to parse qualia existing. Feel free to ask me about it.

2. I don’t think our local sample of the universe as filtered through a Natural Selection Optimized Set of Perceptions is a randomly distributed enough sample to make claims on all that is being purely a mechanistic cascade.

3. I think anyone trying to create a philosophy around a universal consciousness is just reinventing monotheism. Particularly monotheistic hinduism, or perhaps a sort of calvinism. To that I say shaktism and other models of dualistic theism. Go vibes it out with two of your most discordant religious friends. Monotheism vs polytheism has been around for a long time, in many shapes and sizes.

4. You can argue this is also a manifestation of values derived from the Natural Selection Optimized Set Of Perceptions. I’m a living creature. Being a living creature that is alive is actually the best thing, and if your belief set disagrees - though arguments of heaven, nirvana, or other suicides that hate manifestations of the flesh/the uncertainty of reality/qualia/agency/etc - that’s deeply unfortunate for you, but also a skill issue.

5. I don’t think my case relies on free will in the short term, although in the long term there are questions of human replaceability that arise. Personally my qualia is not replaceable - there’s something going on in here. Y’all can make your own choices in the upload tho

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Fun space of thought to explore, but maybe in a literal sci-fi context ;)

Footnotes

1. A subset of social network we’ve always had, people who like the same sorts of things and find the same sort of thing funny hanging out more when they’re living in the same area. Let me give you a couple examples of memes. More classic local or hobby ones may be things like the maple leafs, your mom, or just stand up, while more internet-based ones may be things like aarakocra ranged echo knight, too toxic for league, touch grass, vriska (vriska), go back to your wife ↩

2. I like to think it’s beliefs but also how you communicate them through humor. Some people agree with me but are deeply insufferable to engage with. Some people agree with me but are on a totally different platform because they still only go on www.moreawesomethanyou.com because they’re 70, or are 23 and exist only in discords created from a group of r/AITA fake story writers, etc. We’ve all been siloed pretty heavily in social medias. ↩

3. I subscribe to the theory that morals are evolved and based on shared objective values about what is good for us and “our tribe”, with cultural variation as different solutions to the same questions. ↩

4. As every social media giant and ad host is currently trying to accurately model from their personal data of your browsing behaviour & the LLM’s mass scraping of the internet. ↩

5. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8km974x4 ↩

6. lack of this kind of dense communication is also a problem of modern dating, but that’s a whole other kettle of worms ↩

7. I’m trying to write a scifi book in this style right now, but you have to admit that’s more an act of poetry than effective communication. The effectiveness of metaphor and its communication denseness aside. Linguists, please don’t take this as a fixed belief. ↩

8. Some people are very social and can do this with pretty much everyone you know or just do it slightly better than you. These people are central nodes in their network and in day to day life seen as “socialites” or “influencers” or “popular” or “good hosts” or “the guy who always knows a guy” or “friendly” etc etc etc ↩

9. Harder than by directly injecting your brain with a snow crash virus, at least. ↩

10. We sure do all seem to believe some variant of this about whoever we disagree with online. ↩

11. Do you consent to read? Or does it just happen when the words hit your eyes? ↩

12. Or when the many private companies working on AI start reading the cog-sci people’s homework ;) ↩

13. A metaphor, not a fixed belief. ↩

14. See the SEGUE at the end if this is throwing you off. ↩

15. Arrow’s theory people do NOT take this seriously until I formalize it. thanks ↩

16. And while we’re at it, peace on earth 🤭 ↩

17. ↩

18. Or after your brain dynamics disruption of choice ↩

19. Although which objects are a field of vigorous debate also. ↩