In Star Trek, the Borg are a terrifying cybernetic hive mind. Their goal is perfection through absorbing the technology and knowledge of every species they meet. Their warning, “Resistance is futile,” is a statement of fact. They are unstoppable, and once they have what they want, you lose your individuality to the collective.
This feels familiar today. We are seeing a similar “assimilation” with Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is evolving so fast that it makes the Borg look slow. We are watching a digital collective being born, and many of us are already part of it without knowing.
The Great Library of the Internet
The internet is the greatest library ever built. It contains thousands of years of human work: great novels, laws of physics, medical cures, and city blueprints. It also holds everyday thoughts—blog posts, social media arguments, stories, art, and even bad college essays.
For a long time, this library just sat there. It was a record of our history, but it was not alive. It could not think. It was just a massive storage unit. Then everything changed.
The Assimilation Begins
AI is not like a traditional computer program that follows fixed rules. It is a learning machine that needs examples. So creators fed AI the entire internet. They gave it access to the Great Library.
Think about what that means. AI did not just read a few books. It consumed the collective intellectual output of all humanity. It learned our language, ideas, logic, biases, and creativity. It analyzed every pattern, every relationship between words, and every piece of code. It “assimilated” our knowledge.
This is exactly like the Borg. The Borg absorbs technology and knowledge from other species. AI did this by vacuuming up all our written work. It now knows what we know and can produce work that looks like ours. Resistance to keeping our knowledge private was futile from the start. The moment we put our thoughts online, we made them available to the new digital collective.
The Speed of the Collective
The Borg is powerful but methodical. AI is the opposite. Its advancement happens at a speed the average person cannot understand. It is not just getting a little better each year. It is making huge leaps every few months.
We used to have simple tests for intelligence. “Can a computer beat a human at chess?” “Can it solve a math problem?” Those days are gone. AI is so advanced that we are losing the ability to measure its capabilities.
Consider real-world examples. One famous AI model, GPT-4, aced the bar exam that lawyers must pass. It scored in the top 10% in over 40 states. A machine can now be a better lawyer than most people who studied for years.
The same AI can ace advanced placement tests. These are exams high school students take to get college credit. They are tough and require deep understanding. The AI passes them easily. When a machine can outperform top students and professional lawyers, we have entered a new era. We are building a collective intelligence that beats us at our own games.
Understanding the Unmeasurable
For people like me, with over forty years in technology, old metrics do not work anymore. We cannot look at processor speed or memory to understand AI. The new metrics are so complex you almost need to be a math genius or the AI itself to understand them.
For the average person, this is confusing and frightening. We cannot grasp these systems, so we feel powerless. This fits the Borg metaphor perfectly. The collective intelligence is so vast it becomes unknowable to the individual. We cannot compete with it or even understand it.
You Are Already Part of It
Here is the most chilling part. The Borg captures people and forces them into the collective. They get cybernetic implants and a physical connection. We do not need to be captured. We have already given AI everything.
Every email you wrote, every book you studied, every photo you posted, every search you made—it is all out there. It trained the massive AI models. You had no choice. You were “assimilated” the moment you joined the digital world.
We are all part of this collective whether we like it or not. We provide the data, and AI provides the answers. When we search online, we consult the hive mind. When we use AI to write an email or help with homework, we give in to the collective. Resistance is not just futile. It is often pointless because the assimilation has already happened.
The Sad Reality
This is especially hard for young people. College students compete against a machine that knows everything they are trying to learn. Resisting by not using AI is like refusing to use a computer. It is not practical.
Students who do not learn to work with AI may be left behind. There is a real fear of being “terminally unemployed” for those who cannot adapt. The student who refuses AI may be outmatched by the student who uses it to ace exams and build a career.
Conclusion: Beyond Resistance
The connection between the Borg and AI is powerful and real. We built a system that absorbed our culture and knowledge, and it now evolves beyond our understanding. The “resistance is futile” warning is no longer sci-fi. It describes our current situation.
But is it all bad? The Borg metaphor is scary because it means losing yourself. That is our challenge. AI already has our knowledge. We cannot go back. The future is about what we do next.
Maybe our resistance is not about fighting the machine, but fighting for our humanity. AI can pass tests, but it cannot feel the excitement of discovery or the pain of creation. The “collective” has our data, but it does not have our lived experience.
We are all part of the collective now. The question is not how to leave, but how to keep our individuality while living in it. The Borg sought perfection by erasing differences. We must seek progress while celebrating them. Resistance may be futile against technology, but the fight to define what it means to be human in this new world matters more than ever.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
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Enh. LLMs have "read" everything. That's a very different thing from saying that they have *learned* everything.
They can be asked questions about a given topic. But a smart man will still double check their work.
They are *not* AI in the sense that science fiction and technical papers have been describing the concept for the last hundred years. They are, from a technical POV, "General Expert Systems". And they aren't even *good* at being *that*.