Why do you think that linking brains together directly would be so much more effective than email?
It’s a premise to a scifi story, where the topology is to be never discussed. If you are to actually think in the detail… how are you planning to connect your million brains?
Let’s say you connect the brains as a 3d lattice, where each connects to 6 neighbours, 100x100x100. Far from closely cooperating team, you get a game of Chinese whispers from brains on one side to brains on the other.
Why do you think that linking brains together directly would be so much more effective than email?
The most obvious answer would be speed. If you can simulate 1,000,000 brains at, say, 1,000 times the speed they would normally operate, the bottleneck becomes communication between nodes.
You don’t need to restrict yourself to a 3d topology. Supercomputers with hundreds of thousands of cores can and do use e.g. 6D topologies. It seems that a far more efficient way to organize the brains would be how organizations work in real life: hierarchical structure, where each node is at most O(log n) steps away from any other node.
If brains are 1000x faster, they type the emails 1000x faster as well.
Why do you think, exactly, that brains are going to correctly integrate into some single super mind at all? Things like memory retrieval, short term memory, etc etc. have specific structures, those structures, they do not extend across your network.
So you got your hierarchical structure, so you ask the top head to mentally multiply two 50 digit numbers, why do you think that the whole thing will even be able to recite the numbers back at you, let alone perform any calculations?
Note that rather than connecting the cortices, you could just provide each brain with fairly normal computer with which to search the works of other brains and otherwise collaborate, the way mankind already does.
Why do you think that linking brains together directly would be so much more effective than email?
It’s a premise to a scifi story, where the topology is to be never discussed. If you are to actually think in the detail… how are you planning to connect your million brains?
Let’s say you connect the brains as a 3d lattice, where each connects to 6 neighbours, 100x100x100. Far from closely cooperating team, you get a game of Chinese whispers from brains on one side to brains on the other.
The most obvious answer would be speed. If you can simulate 1,000,000 brains at, say, 1,000 times the speed they would normally operate, the bottleneck becomes communication between nodes.
You don’t need to restrict yourself to a 3d topology. Supercomputers with hundreds of thousands of cores can and do use e.g. 6D topologies. It seems that a far more efficient way to organize the brains would be how organizations work in real life: hierarchical structure, where each node is at most O(log n) steps away from any other node.
If brains are 1000x faster, they type the emails 1000x faster as well.
Why do you think, exactly, that brains are going to correctly integrate into some single super mind at all? Things like memory retrieval, short term memory, etc etc. have specific structures, those structures, they do not extend across your network.
So you got your hierarchical structure, so you ask the top head to mentally multiply two 50 digit numbers, why do you think that the whole thing will even be able to recite the numbers back at you, let alone perform any calculations?
Note that rather than connecting the cortices, you could just provide each brain with fairly normal computer with which to search the works of other brains and otherwise collaborate, the way mankind already does.