As with the button last year, people set up factions, appoint leaders and then abandon them as fast as they are created. But now, every time a majority in a room votes to GROW, two microcultures clash together. In most cases, they merge and grow further, which makes it difficult to retrace how some memes and behaviours originated. It also shows how the quality of the conversation decreases as more and more random people join in.
Hours since Robin was published, scripts for automation were made - pressing buttons, counting people, ignoring spammers. By now there are all kinds of bots, doing quizzes and creating word clouds, but mostly spamming. Some people started drawing on other websites, created new subreddits or wrote down their name and history in shared documents.
This was an eye opening experience for me, because it shows what may be possible with VR and what might happen once BCIs are perfected.
Exactly. To me, this experiment made it clear that the speed with which information is exchanged, new ideas are formed and behaviours adapted will increase drastically the more people are intimately connected to the internet. Not even half of the world population are connected yet. Virtual reality will remove further barriers, BCIs may completely remove them.
Looking back, the experience seems remarkably alien, but in the moment of action, you were part of a hivemind. In large rooms, only powerful ideas could propagate, no matter how meaningful they were.
I wonder what rude shocks we are in for .. BCI+VR may give us some sort of super-being, a multi-dimensional entity to deal with.
Just another annoying passenger on the bus, or supreme overlord of entire universes? Still a very thin line, or at least .. one can hope it will still be easy to unplug when this hits us.
That is what I'm wondering about, too. Not only how the external relationship between this "hivemind" and those that are not a part of it would look like, but especially what kind of effect this would have on the human brain.
Is the plasticity of the brain sufficient to adapt to these new "senses"? What is the perceptual relationship between the content of the message and the modulation? And what happens to consciousness, when two or more brains are closer and closer connected? One fascinating case is that of craniopagus twins, conjoined at the head. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craniopagus_twins
"when Krista started drinking her juice Tatiana felt it physically going through her body."
The hard problem of consciousness is still elusive. I recently found http://integratedinformationtheory.org/, which takes an axiomatic approach, but estimating the effects for large networks seems to be too difficult as of now.
As with the button last year, people set up factions, appoint leaders and then abandon them as fast as they are created. But now, every time a majority in a room votes to GROW, two microcultures clash together. In most cases, they merge and grow further, which makes it difficult to retrace how some memes and behaviours originated. It also shows how the quality of the conversation decreases as more and more random people join in.
Hours since Robin was published, scripts for automation were made - pressing buttons, counting people, ignoring spammers. By now there are all kinds of bots, doing quizzes and creating word clouds, but mostly spamming. Some people started drawing on other websites, created new subreddits or wrote down their name and history in shared documents.
This was an eye opening experience for me, because it shows what may be possible with VR and what might happen once BCIs are perfected.