Global Brain - Criticisms

Criticisms

A common criticism of the idea that humanity would become directed by a global brain is that this would reduce individual freedom and diversity. Moreover, the global brain might start to play the role of Big Brother, the all-seeing eye of the system that follows every person's move. This criticism is inspired by totalitarian and collectivist forms of government, like the ones found in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao Zedong's China. It is also inspired by the analogy between collective intelligence or swarm intelligence and insect societies, such as beehives and ant colonies in which individuals are essentially interchangeable. In a more extreme view, the global brain has been compared with the Borg, the race of collectively thinking cyborgs imagined by the creators of the Star Trek science fiction series.

Global brain theorists reply that the emergence of distributed intelligence would lead to the exact opposite of this vision,. The reason is that effective collective intelligence requires diversity, decentralization and individual independence, as demonstrated by James Surowiecki in his The Wisdom of Crowds. Moreover, a more distributed form of decision-making would decrease the power of governments, corporations or political leaders, thus increasing democratic participation and reducing the dangers of totalitarian control.