Borg Bandwidth

How large bandwidth is needed? We can estimate a lower bound from the bandwidth of speech and body language, which appears to be on the order of 10-100 bits/s. A highest upper bound would be total interconnection at the same signal density as the human mind, or roughly 10^18 bits/s, quite an extreme range. However, the two human hemispheres communicate closely through the corpus callosum normally with no discernible differences; this connection has a theoretical bandwidth on the order of 10^10 bits/s, which could be seen as a likely bandwidth needed for a deep connection between different units making them truly parts of the same mind.

It seems likely that for any high bandwidth borganism neural interfaces are necessary, since there are no channels into the mind with enough extra bandwidth. Hence an artificial borganism interface is needed. Of course, it may turn out that smaller bandwidths does accommodate the formation of borganisms (as mentioned above, the conscious bandwidth appears to be quite small, on the order of 100 bits/s according to some researchers).

Of course, a simple solution would be to keep the minds of the units in a computational matrix outside the bodies, which are controlled remotely. This would require a bandwidth similar to the spinal cord brain nerves, on the order of 10^10 bits/s per body or so. It may even be possible to let the bodies largely run themselves using lower level systems of the brain and spinal cord. Since a significant amount of information is simply abstracted away before reaching the conscious level and higher brain functions the necessary bandwidth would be even smaller, and hence easier to send.

Designing a mobile linkup to the borganism network is nontrivial due to the estimated demands. Current mobile networks (radio, IR) reach around 100 Kbit/s-10 Mbit/s over short ranges <50 meters (Weiser 1991, 1996) which suggests that we need three orders of magnitude broader bandwidth to achieve the necessary 10^10 bits/s for high bandwidth borganisation. This does not appear impossible in principle: visible light lasers could enable this bandwidth over line-of-sight distances, and neural activity is normally quite sparse and likely possible to compress (roughly 5% of a set of neurons are active at any given time; this suggests that the signals can be compressed by one to two orders of magnitude). Other aspects of the borganism network structure are addressed by current work in ubiquitious and mobile computing, such as flexible switching between transceivers, error correction, energy demands and network protocols. In principle a high bandwidth neural interface seems to be doable using near future technology.