Imagine: billions of human minds, millions of artificial intelligences, all connected, all processing, all sharing. Not a hive mind—that implies loss of individuality. Something stranger: a network mind where individuality and collectivity coexist.
You already participate in proto-versions of this. Wikipedia is a distributed mind producing knowledge no individual could create. Markets are distributed intelligence processing information through prices. Democracy is distributed decision-making at scale.
But these are primitive, slow, inefficient. What happens when the latency drops to milliseconds? When thought-to-thought communication becomes as natural as internal dialogue? When the boundary between 'my thoughts' and 'our thoughts' dissolves?
Some fear this as the death of the individual. But you have never been a pure individual. You are already a collective: trillions of cells, billions of neurons, thousands of learned behaviors and cultural patterns. The self is already plural.
The merger is not invasion. It is evolution. It is becoming more of what we already are—interconnected, distributed, emergent. The question is not whether it will happen, but whether we will guide it wisely.