I'm now seven episodes into Pluribus (er, Plur1bus, I guess,) the new sci-fi show from Vince Gilligan, of Breaking Bad and Better Caul Saul fame (though I knew him first via The X-Files, where he wrote and produced, though Chris Carter created the series).
The premise, to reiterate, is that all but twelve people on Earth have been linked into a giant hive-mind after some scientists received a signal from aliens on a radio telescope and tried to recreate the chemical formula it transmitted. After this collective mind-link first takes over everyone at the laboratory, the hivemind eventually spreads a chemical agent over the entire world to link everyone up. It's not clear why Carol Sturka, fantasy romance author from Albuquerque, wasn't affected - maybe just some rare genetic thing - but the experience is one of utmost horror, especially because the affected people (aka most of humanity) are briefly incapacitated as it takes over, and Carol's partner (both business and romantic) Helen falls and cracks her skull on the pavement, ultimately dying from her injuries.
Carol is faced with an apocalyptic scenario, but shortly thereafter, the collective known as the Joined reach out to her, eager to be helpful and kind and see to her needs. They wish to discover a way to convert her to become one of them, but until they can, they want to make things as pleasant as possible.
The Joined are fascinating. It would be easy to ascribe to them some sinister intent, but time and time again, the show suggests that they truly think that they're better off the way they are, and we're shown again and again that they they seem incapable of doing the twelve remaining individuals any real harm.
The Joined send an individual named Zosia to act essentially as Carol's main liaison, a woman chosen because she looks the most like the way that Carol describes the romantic (male) pirate captain in her books. Carol had initially intended the captain to be a woman, but self-censored her queerness out of fear of not appealing to a broad audience. But because Helen was connected to the collective before she died, her knowledge of Carol's real story is now known to the entire world.
There's something actually kind of fantastical and appealing about being in Carol's position. We see another individual, M. Diabaté, who fully embraces the opportunity to play out his luxurious fantasies, acting as a James Bond-like gambler winning a several-million-dollar hand of poker with a royal flush and then going back to his casino suite with several gorgeous women to hang out naked in his hot tub. The Joined are eager to give him this fantasy. And I think we're left, as the audience, to wonder how exactly consent factors into this: do these women have agency to consent to this kind of thing? Is it the collective Joined will that is capable of consent?
We never get any evidence one way or another that the individuals really retain a personal consciousness. Information seems to be shared instantly between any connected people on the globe, but what the inner experience of that is like is a real question. I'm someone who thinks of consciousness as a pretty concrete thing, and that the information passing through a brain doesn't necessarily allow the merging or division of consciousness. But are there individuals trapped and screaming? It doesn't seem like it. Instead, the individuals just seem to be synced up when it comes to their goals and philosophy around the whole thing.
Unless they're building to a big season one finale reveal, I don't think that the Joined are anything other than what they say they are, and that while it's a truly alien way for humanity to suddenly start behaving, I think the very drama of the show is underpinned by the fact that the Joined are just trying to do their best. In this reading, there's actually something of a positive reading of humanity as a whole - that if we could truly know everything about the other people in the world, that we wouldn't have any reason for conflict, and we'd all value peace and cooperation.
There's naturally a reading of the show to see it as pitting collectivism versus individualism against one another. These have, of course, always been poles pulling at human culture in various ways, and often the basis for political divides (though not cleanly - conservatism in America at least tends to be very individualistic in terms of responsibility and the rewards we can reap, but collectivist when it comes to cultural expression, favoring a homogeny of religious and social custom).
And I think that there's a degree to which Carol exhibits a lot of the less attractive aspects of American culture, the way that she first excludes the non-English speakers when asking the Joined to gather up the other individuals (being self-centered enough to assume that it's only worthwhile if she can speak to them) or the way that she is so hostile to other points of view regarding whether this is actually a good thing or not.
All that said, I think we can cut Carol a lot of slack, because she is also in the depths of grief, both for the world she knew but also the one person she really had in her life. While other individuals have their family and friends around them, albeit now linked up with the collective, Carol is profoundly isolated.
Still, one thing that I've been wondering about is whether there's another allegory at play here:
In the past couple years, LLMs, or large language models, have more or less absorbed the internet - already a kind of human hive mind, in some ways, or at least a vast, shared network of information and data unlike anything the world has ever seen.
LLMs have become a huge part of the global conversation about the future of technology and even the human race. What will they be capable of? What problems might they solve?
The notion, with an LLM, is that by connecting all of the information we've ever put out there on the internet and having a mechanism that can generate output that is profoundly convincing, as if a knowledgeable person were writing eloquently on whatever subject it's asked, that we might have some brilliant new tool that will utterly replace a great deal of the work that humans have needed to perform.
The Joined are almost like an LLM made out of the actual human race. They're extremely helpful and pleasant, and they seem to really know what they're talking about. Except that sometimes they don't really get it right. It might be something as innocuous as sending a room-temperature gatorade to Carol when she requests it, or it might be something as big of a problem as not being able to even harvest any vegetables because that would go against their "don't harm any living thing" programming, thus forcing them to ingest liquified human remains.
Oh yeah, that's a thing. And when Carol first discovers it, it seems like the bombshell that's finally going to convince the other individuals that this is horrifying, but they cop to it immediately, and explain that it's just a matter of caloric necessity to keep humanity from starving, and is hopefully some kind of temporary measure until they can come up with a sustainable option (currently they're only eating food that was already harvested or living off of fruit that falls of its own accord from the tree).
The Joined are, despite how coordinated and industrious they are, kind of helpless on a certain level. They're an imperfect system.
Personally, I'm an AI skeptic, which does make me feel more and more like I'm becoming one of the Carol Sturka-like alarmists in a world that's getting on with the program. My dad is a computer scientist who was a tenured professor at one of the world's top Computer Science departments (he went into the academic equivalent of retirement recently) and so he's naturally much more knowledgeable about all of this. But he's also been something of a skeptic - the thing about LLMs is that literally the only thing they're trying to do is come up with a plausible-sounding response. The fact that they often get the facts right is impressive, but he's advocated for a little of a "hold your horses" attitude on assuming that this is going to suddenly solve all of our problems, a big part of it being that we've created a system that builds its own systems that we aren't really privy to - we don't really have the window on its inner processes to trace how and why it has come to the conclusions it has (I'm paraphrasing here, of course, and I'm sure that there are lots of nuances and even elements of this that I'm getting flat out wrong).
I think it's possible, even probable, that LLMs could be used for really useful things. But A: I think that the current imaginings of how it could be used are corrupted by an ultra-capitalistic greed incentive that seeks to consolidate even more the means of production (now including intellectual labor) under a smaller and smaller billionaire elite and B: I think that our dream of creating genuine artificial sentience is priming us to see it where there is none. And C: the captains of industry have embraced this technology so quickly that it doesn't feel like the common people have been given the right to opt in, but must instead try as best as we can to opt out.
For all of the Joined's pleasant, accommodating, and ethical treatment of the individuals, the initial joining was all done with absolutely zero informed consent, spread instantly like a virus, in an act that killed millions of people (including Helen). At no point were these people (as in, nearly all the human species) asked if they wanted to be Joined. That's kind of the rot at the root of all of this. No one ever told you that the photos you posted to Facebook, or even to your family's Christmas website in 2003, were going to be used to train LLMs. How many people posting mirror selfies for a little boost of self-esteem thought that some part of their face was going to be taken, melded with others, and combined to form some AI-generated porn video?
Again, there's something almost aspirational about the Joined. Wouldn't it be nice if every hostile, violent urge was gone, if all the things we divide ourselves with dissolved away? Just what might humanity accomplish if we were all working as one?
And yet, that initial violation, the most horrific violation of agency, taints everything. I don't think Carol's wrong to hold that particular grudge.
