Create a human hive mind

[GTOM]

I was inspired by Jane Hawk trilogy of Dean Koontz. The villains injected people with brain control nanobots, and the possessed humans could form a hive mind.
The villain try to do something similar in my story, that is supposed to be rather scientifically realistic, not space fantasy. On the other hand, she cant inject all the people in a town, the nano have to get in by drinkwater, so only a tiny amount for each victim. Is it a bottleneck, how the possessed people will be able to receive and emit radio waves, to act like one supermind? Maybe the nanobots should extract the trace elements of the body? If that dont result in fast death, later the trace elements can replaced by medicines.

 

[jedishrfu]

Imagine a computer network that is how your hive mind might work. The central authority broadcasts messages to every member at the same time, or the central authority sends out a more selective message to certain hive members to do a task.

These four basic message types can be found in ZeroMQ:

• REQ–REP: “Ask and answer.” Client sends one message; server must reply. Lockstep.
• PUB–SUB: “Broadcast and listen.” The publisher sends it to anyone who is subscribed.
• PUSH–PULL: “Pipeline tasks.” PUSH distributes tasks; PULL receives them.
• PAIR: “Just two endpoints.” For inproc or one-to-one connections. No routing or patterns.

So Hive Command does a PUB-SUB (ie all Hive members have subscribed) to activate its army. During the course of a battle, Hive Command sends out specific messages to small groups or to single Hive members to execute some task. They must respond with a status update.

Bottlenecks could occur when Hive Command launches multiple foreys using smaller attack groups, which then respond with numerous status messages, swamping the network and slowing it down.

You could factor it into your story. It's always good that both good and bad actors have weaknesses to exploit.

 

[256bits]

Is it a bottleneck, how the possessed people will be able to receive and emit radio waves, to act like one supermind?

That's your question to answer.

Hive is evident in the animal world everywhere, and cues can be taken from there.
Schools of fish, and flocks of birds communicate somehow to form an 'organism' that appears to operate without a central command centre. The usual example of hive, such as bees and ants, for the benefit of the group, have individuals making choices. A food supply is communicated from one ant to another by exchange of chemicals. For bees, the food supply is communicated by one to many by the dance that us done at the physical location, or home, of the hive.

For humans we have other concerns since we think we have free will.
Star Trek portrayed the Borg as being evil, taking over societies and incorporating them into the Borg hive. Is it evil? Maybe Yes and maybe No. From a western perspective of individual rights versus collective, then Yes. For a functioning non-anarchist society then the answer is No.

Actual human society exhibits hive behavior, even if it is not called that, as some conditioning may apply so as to achieve the expected outcome.
Just two examples:
School children know to go to class when the bell rings.
Cross the street on the walk button at the busy downtown intersection, otherwise wait.

Somewhat unconditioned hive behavior, or innate would be the crowd cheer when a goal is scored at a hockey game, the boos at a bad referee call, the wave that occurs from the fans that spreads around the stadium. Although one can argue that culture dictates spectator response, my point is that the hive ( spectators ) can respond to the game as a whole ( cheer. boo ) regardless of the response of the next individual, or dependent upon the next individual ( the stadium wave ). What is happening within the game ( the action, the goal, the referee call ) would be, as an analogy, the central command given to the hive to govern its response. The wave, on the other hand, would be hive generated, either spontaneously, or from some cue ( time, game action ), by one or a few individuals ( programmed to do so randomly in the brain circuitry ).

Using radio waves for communication is not all that different from using the senses sight, sound, touch that we all possess. It does add the extra element of the 'villian' over riding the natural human hive behavior with his/her own tech generated hive responses which may be at odds with what an unaffected human would do.

Of course I took some liberties, probably not present in scientific literature, but isn't that the raison d'etre behind fiction - expanding upon the natural world.