PLURIBUS Drops a ‘Grenade’ About the Hive Mind’s Biggest Weakness

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“Why would you give me a hand grenade?”
“You asked for one.”

The collective consciousness of Pluribus holds the knowledge, memories, and life experiences of almost everyone on Earth. This vast network, encompassing eight billion people, theoretically makes it the greatest expert in any field imaginable. However, the recent episode, “Grenade,” revealed a surprising flaw: despite its immense intelligence, Pluribus often demonstrates a lack of common sense and emotional understanding. This isn’t just a technical glitch; it poses a fundamental threat to humanity.

In the third episode of Pluribus, the collective intelligence noticed Carol’s request for a hand grenade might have been sarcastic. However, it couldn’t recognize the sarcasm or react appropriately. It’s designed to be overly nice, polite, and accommodating, and completely lacks the ability to understand what someone means rather than just what they say. It always takes things at face value, even when it suspects something isn’t genuine. Essentially, the Pluribus hive mind has the emotional awareness of a very young child, which is a significant flaw. This is why the hive mind malfunctions when Carol is unkind – it can’t handle emotions beyond simple positivity.

Common sense is incredibly valuable, and perhaps most importantly, it helps us stay safe. The group’s inability to think things through almost resulted in Carol and her representative, Zosia, being seriously harmed.

Everyone makes mistakes, and considering the AI is essentially new to existence, some errors are understandable. It has access to all of human knowledge, but it’s still learning. We’d expect growing pains, and with the memories of eight billion people, we’d hope it would learn quickly, especially from major mistakes. However, it shockingly offered Carol another hand grenade, and even more concerning, would grant her access to an atom bomb with minimal hesitation, despite her explicitly stating it was a ridiculous request. Carol pointed out that a simple ‘no’ would be reasonable, even sane, at this point.

The idea of giving someone a nuclear weapon is so obviously wrong that anyone thinking clearly should immediately recognize how dangerous it is. However, this collective intelligence seems unable to refuse even the most extreme requests. It claims it’s driven by a fundamental need to both exist as it does and to ‘save’ Carol, and it believes making her happy – even offering anything she desires – is the way to do that, regardless of the catastrophic consequences for everyone else. This contradicts its own stated purpose of survival.

Zosia told Carol that the people affected by the virus believe it was actually sent to protect humanity from things like war, pain, starvation, and unhappiness – things they felt were going to wipe out mankind. Carol explained that the collective consciousness, or ‘hive,’ thinks it’s now living a perfect, idyllic life – like something out of a picture postcard. The ‘Pluribus’ hive mind agrees with this, but it doesn’t realize Carol meant it as a criticism. It’s similar to how it didn’t understand she was being sarcastic when she pretended to want a hand grenade, or that giving anyone – especially someone who dislikes you – an atomic bomb is a terrible idea. This all suggests one clear thing: this alien virus feels like a dangerous deception.

It was frightening when Pluribus showed how an ancient power transformed nearly everyone on Earth into peaceful, obedient people who couldn’t even wonder why an alien race would want to erase individuality elsewhere in the galaxy. But the third Pluribus episode, “Grenade,” revealed that humanity’s situation is even more dire. This new, collective biology has made humankind incredibly intelligent, capable of things no single person could achieve. They’re talented, brilliant, happy, and peaceful. However, this has created a fatal flaw in Pluribus’ hive mind: humanity is now too naive to realize this biological drive isn’t actually beneficial. While it’s supposed to be a natural urge to survive and reproduce, it’s actually leading to mankind’s destruction.

If you don’t grasp the dangers of nuclear weapons, humanity likely won’t survive. It’s that simple.

Mikey Walsh writes for TopMob. You can find him on Bluesky at @burgermike, and he’s always interested in discussions about ranking the Targaryen kings.

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2025-11-14 20:33