Hive minds are totalitarian in the sense that conformity is mandated, and that conformity reaches down to the lowest levels of our existence… even if such conformity is divided into castes.

I consider hive minds to be a subset of group minds in general. Something less totalitarian is more likely to occur.

What would it look like? The most lenient types simply take the form of a network. Language is such a network. Mirror neurons also create a network in which information passes between individuals to such an extent that feedback loops of emotions occur in society. For example, in Britain they did a study on happiness to see if happiness is contagious…. and they found it definitely is.

What sorts of new networks and languages will we create? We already have the Internet and Massively Multiplayer Online Games. It seems likely that brain wave readers, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality will progress to a stage of similar profundity.

Artificial Intelligences would almost undoubtedly organize into group minds, but it will likely be in the form of modular components rather than assimilating each into a single monolithic framework.

In order for human beings to achieve that type of organization, we would need something better than mirror neurons and spoken language. These are low fidelity. They are slow to filter out between large groups of people and they are highly liable to misinterpretation. Thus brain-computer interfaces are essential for modularity with high fidelity. Yet, being a network, each person only receives signals from the collective from which it can autonomously determine what to do.

The benefit, though, is that there would never be any disagreement about what exactly is occuring…. just disagreements about core values. Much like in the Open Source ecosystem, divergent values would lead to “forks.” Majoritarian Democracy, Consensus Democracy, Oligarchy, and even Autocracy are all possible organizational modes.

Of course we are already group minds in some ways since there are nested levels of consciousness. The meta I Am You god-level (if it exists), and then levels below that (group minds)… all the way down toward the microqualia that we simultaneously carry in our individual heads (a la the split brain).