Will future AI take inspiration from the Borg? (Picture: CBS Photo Archive)
Forget the Simpsons – Star Trek was right.
Researchers say different artificial intelligence (AI) units will one day team up and share information with each other, just like the Borg.
The Borg are cybernetic organisms in Star Trek, who operate through a linked hive-mind known as ‘The Collective’.
But a new study from the Universities of Loughborough, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said that we are set to see the emergence of a ‘collective AI’.
This is where different units, each capable of learning and gaining new skills, can form a network and share information via a common language.
However, they believe it will not bring about the end of humanity, as often the case with collective minds in sci-fi shows.
The researchers predict that the collective AI will lead to many positive breakthroughs across different fields.
A model of a Borg Cube from Star Trek: The Next Generation (Picture: Getty)
Loughborough University’s Dr Andrea Soltoggio, the research lead, said: ‘Instant knowledge sharing across a collective network of AI units capable of continuously learning and adapting to new data will enable rapid responses to novel situations, challenges, or threats.
‘For example, in a cybersecurity setting if one AI unit identifies a threat, it can quickly share knowledge and prompt a collective response, much like how the human immune system protects the body from outside invaders.
‘It could also lead to the development of disaster response robots that can quickly adapt to the conditions they are dispatched in, or personalised medical agents that improve health outcomes by merging cutting-edge medical knowledge with patient-specific information.
‘The potential applications are vast and exciting.’
However, the researchers do note there could be some risks that come with collective AI, such as the swift spread of potentially unethical or incorrect knowledge.
However, they say that, in their vision, the AI units could stay safe by maintaining their own objectives and independence from the collective.
The researchers predict the hive mind will be good and not evil like most sci-fi films (Picture: Getty)
Dr Soltoggio describes this as ‘a democracy of AI agents, significantly reducing the risks of an AI domination by few large systems.’
The AI Collective differs from the current large AI models, such as ChatGPT, which have limited lifelong learning and knowledge-sharing capabilities, the researchers said.
They explain that ChatGPT and similar models gain most of their knowledge during energy-intense training sessions and are unable to continue learning.
‘We believe that the current dominating large, expensive, non-shareable and non-lifelong AI models will not survive in a future where sustainable, evolving and sharing collective of AI units are likely to emerge,’ said Dr Soltoggio.
‘Human knowledge has grown incrementally over millennia thanks to communication and sharing.
“We believe similar dynamics are likely to occur in future societies of artificial intelligence units that will implement democratic and collaborating collectives.’
Their research was funded by the US Defence Advanced Research Project Agency (Darpa) and is published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.