With individual intelligences, you can have the car that’s driving down the street not knowing that you are going to be crossing the street at that point in time and then poof! You got yourself an accident. With collective intelligence though, that doesn’t happen. Because the whole definition of knowing something or not knowing something breaks down. The members of collective intelligence don’t have the notion of knowing something. It’s only the “central intelligence” that the members are hooked up to that has the notion of knowing something. Which means that you can have the central intelligence deciding that a car driving down the street does not create an accident with the person crossing the street.
— In reaction to Yuval Noah Harari’s book Homo Deus (the paragraph about the a-mortals anxious about dying in an accident)
Sophia KornienkoComment