Thoughts on Distributed Computation in Plur1bus

In "Pirate Lady" (S1E2), we see Zosia (played by Karolina Wydra) act with the kind of quiet confidence of someone who can pull a dead body out of wreckage and then motor scooter along to fly a plane with a short take off runway by herself.

Well, "herself" is not the right word, because the entity that is flying the plane is the collective "hive mind" (as many reviewers call it). This entity is not of extraterrestrial origin, but it sure would be alien to us. It is a Super Intelligence.

Past shows that featured a Super Intelligence include the much underrated Mrs. Davis (Peacock, 2023) and arguably the best JJ Abrams/Jonathan Nolan show Person of Interest (CBS, 2011–2016). It's a fascinating trope to see what a near omnipresent system with surveillant knowledge can do to marshal people and resources effectively. In Mrs. Davis there is a great plot involving collecting large amounts of cash in a short time, kicked off by a random truck driver throwing the protagonist empty trash bags.

Thinking Nodes

In Plu1bus, we see that any node acting for the collective "we" (as in "We Is Us", S1E1) can speak in any language. A node can access information known any the individual that has been through "The Joining," even those that have since passed away. That's how the neighborhood children knew where Carol (Rhea Seehorn) kept her spare key, because her partner Helen (Miriam Shor) knew it.

In the narrative, one of the Super Intelligence's limits is that it cannot handle the expression of intense emotions or conflict. If a person in our world had that limit, we may call them neurodivergent.

And the Super Intelligence's extraordinary, superhuman capabilities are not always put to their full use.

When Carol sees a man trapped in a harness, when all nodes are in a shutdown state from Carol's earlier anger, she struggles with the controls, unintentionally making the man's face drag against the side of a building. When the Super Intelligence comes back online, one node suggests "we can take it from here, Carol". She hands him the controls and, crucially, he turns the control panel around to make the words right-side up! But any entity with the vast superhuman capabilities would be able to read controls upside down just as well as they could right side up.

So, why do it? This could be a hint that there is some processing limits to each node: enough extra effort or energy would be required that it's more efficient to have the node read it in the node's most familiar format. When Zosia speaks multiple languages in succession, do other language expert nodes need to dedicate most of their thinking to that task? Any distinction with local (per node) processing means that the system itself has some level of individuation.

Communicating Nodes

As demonstrated by the spare key knowledge, there is information replication in this system. When Zosia speaks any new language, is it loaded and stored locally in her head from then on? Or does her head keep only a temporary cache, because most of her memory is now dedicated to holding replicated information about any other manner of things.

After the global disaster of The Joining event, the Super Intelligence tells Carol that all cellular networks are offline. Was this because the cellular networks require too much energy, and are redundant anyway given that the entity has telepathy?

Or, was there something about the cell signals themselves that interfered with that telepathy? And not necessarily due to using the same channels and frequencies, but for any other number of sci-fi reasons.

Or, were all of the cellular networks taken down, because they needed to use those special parts for a new initiative?

If a node, like Zosia, was put in a literal Faraday cage, or perhaps some natural equivalent, would she lose her connection and be even more individuated? If it really is like a cult, with brainwashing techniques, being out of communication with the collective doesn't necessarily mean we'd see the node "snap out of it" and become frightened, speaking only their own language. But losing the connection could mean that counter-brainwashing could be performed. This might be the only way for Carol to learn what the Super Intelligence's plan is.

What's Next?

Perhaps the first order of business for the Super Intelligence is to reproduce! Imagine a large initiative, to look for more candidate planets to send a directed repeat of the alien signal. That could be a plausible explanation for needing to repurpose that cell network infrastructure.

Given that the alien signal was an RNA sequence, I take it as a given that in this narrative universe there is Strong Panspermia. That means that life on all planets originated from the same source, and that there is a durability to life for these sequences to still serve some function, even after evolving over the course of billions of years.

Will we see these aliens in later seasons? Do they have a similar computational joining? Another narrative explanation that doesn't require strong panspermia would be if the show followed a Saurian Hypothesis plot line, as in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Distant Origin" (S3E23). The signal from 600 lightyears away could have been from a terrestrial species that left Earth many millions of years ago. (Enough time for plate tectonics to completely erase traces of an advanced civilization.)

Can humans infected with the not-a-virus even reproduce? There are many questions already about what it would even be like for a baby to be joined to the hive mind.

Other Notes

• The number of people lost during the joining is over a tenth of the global population. That's a literal decimation, from the original term for having a group self punish by randomly killing 1/10th of their members. The killing was random in that there was no preselection and the group broke into subgroups of 10, self assigning numbers 1–10, and then later being forced to murder whomever had the unlucky number when it's announced.

• In distributed systems reliability there is a notion of "consensus" among nodes. The equivalent to a Super Intelligent hive mind would be exactly that: a consensus. However, consensus doesn't mean there will only be milquetoast, lowest common denominator viewpoints. I thought it was a great touch that the Super Intelligence is vegetarian and even won’t step on bugs. In the hive there would be vegetarians, vegans, and Jainists. In the consensus-gathering part of "The Joining" it's very plausible to me that, once egos and identity are no longer relevant, that the lower resource vegetarianism would be seen as the most practical and utilitarian way to go.

• Consensus and an expanded sense of "self" also explains the entity's non-violent nature. Being nearly omnipresent and omniscient, it would be a rather cowardly act to harm someone like Carol, or a gnat for that matter. When making a large pro/con list of "should we do this?" the consensus result wouldn’t have to be the same as the average or median human's stance, because once the idea of the "individual" becomes a collective what might make sense at an individual level is no longer the primary driver.