When Wholes Become Parts
Here’s a nice simple general principle to describe many kinds of systems. When once self-sufficient wholes join together to become parts of a new whole, the parts get simpler and also more different from one another:
The emergence of a higher level entity with functional capabilities is ordinary accompanied by the loss of part types within the lower-level organisms that constitute it. Thus … cells in multicellular organisms will have fewer part types than fee-living protists. … The lower-level organisms are transformed into differentiated parts within the higher-level entity. Along with this, as size increases, parts emerge at an intermediate scale, between the lower level organisms and the higher-level entity. …
In the evolution of multicellularity, cells are transformed from organisms into different tailed parts. Then, as the size of the multicellular entity increased, cells combined to form larger parts, intermediate in scale between as cell and the multicellular organism as a whole. … Cells in metazoans and land plants have fewer part types on average than free-living protists. … found a power law relationship between size and number of cell types in multicellular organisms. Also, the degree of morphological, physiological, and/or behavioral differentiation – in insect societies increases with colony size.
From: Daniel McShea and Carl Anderson. (2005) “The Remodularization of the Organism”, in Werner Callebaut and Diego Rasskin-Gutman, eds., Modularity: Understanding the Development and Evolution of Natural Complex Systems, pp. 185-206, MIT Press, May.
That is, while each cell might in essence need legs, eyes, a mouth, and a stomach, when cells join together they can each live without such things, and they may specialist in order to become part of a leg, eye, etc. for the new organism.
This has an obvious implication for our future. As we humans join together into larger more complex social organizations, our descendants will likely also become simpler and more differentiated. Of course there are limits on how fast these things can change today. Also, the cells in each organism now have a great many parts, and remain similar to each other in a great many ways. Change would likely become much faster if ems become possible.
Absolutely, the minds that comprise the supermind, whether descended from ems or from AlphaGO, will be diverse (in a completely different meaning than in the current political discourse). Greg Egan has some nice thoughts on that in Permutation City, if I remember correctly.
One crucial facet of being a part of an integrated higher-level entity rather than just a mob of your rough equals is the loss of unrestrained individual self-replication ability. In fact I would posit that what differentiates mobs (societies) from superorganisms is precisely that - the degree to which the replication of parts is controlled by the interests of the parts vs. the interests of the whole. Human societies so far have a notoriously low level of control over the reproduction of their members, both under-reproduction and over-reproduction, which implies we are still at a very primitive level of integration. This may explain the dismissive comments about social specialization, stemming from forager-style aversion to inequality.
Mind evolution in the next one hundred years will be blindingly fast by our current standards. It's very exciting, and a good reason to get uploaded as soon as possible, even if you have to commit suicide to make it happen. This month's advances in light-sheet microscopy imply that whole brain emulations might become possible even sooner that I expected, perhaps even in the next 15 - 20 years. It's instructive to compare the progress in brain imaging speeds to the progress of gene sequencing speeds. As the human genome project funding attracted multiple independent inventors, the progress of technology accelerated enormously and gene sequencing prices dropped by about 7 orders of magnitude in less than 30 years. The size differential between a fruit fly brain and the human brain is about 6 orders of magnitude... yes, if brain scanning progresses as fast as gene sequencing did, we will have human whole brain scans in 20 years or so.
And I am willing to carve, copy and split my mind to fit into whatever functions are required in the borg :)
Yes, one sees this all the time in small companies that grow into larger companies. The small companies are founded by and operated by generalists. As they grow, the employees become more and more specialized in both their activities and skills.