not to be cynical, but that dream is already here. that imagery has been used to sell research projects since i was 7 years old in 1982 reading about Hans Mora

not to be cynical, but that dream is already here. that imagery has been used to sell research projects since i was 7 years old in 1982 reading about Hans Moravec's robots in Enter magazine. PC's were the first swarm, then laptops, then AWS, and now cell phones. the reason this works as a daydream is it implies "highly" and "extremely" mean "more than you know now" without a specific metric. You could read articles about how the first PowerQUICC was highly efficient, then the Pentium, then the first GPU, and currently the M1. as for "able to be recondigured and deployed," PC and phone apps cover this preetty nicely, but if that's insufficient, AWS (and co) is the latest incarnation. as for "hive mind," this part if the daydream endures bc it polarizes the sifference between heter and honogeneous computation units. This is alluring bc of the dream of undifferentiated cells being cleverly arranged to form arbitrary functions. Yet it's quite unnecessary. Every computation is effectively formed by hierarchical structures built from NAND gates. The only trope missing here is: Simple Rules