There’s a moment early in Pluribus (the Apple TV show, not the poker bot) where you realise something quietly terrifying.

Everyone has access to the collective intelligence of the human race.

Everyone except our protagonist.

They’re the only one left running on raw, unassisted human firmware while everyone else walks through life plugged into an ambient, always-on cognitive superstructure. A hive mind without the drama. A search engine without the search box. A second brain that’s better than their first one.

That imbalance isn’t just plot.

It’s a preview.

That imbalance feels like a metaphor for the world we’re sprinting toward as AI becomes ubiquitous.

The New Divide: Not Smart vs Less Smart, but Connected vs Alone

In Pluribus, the augmented characters aren’t geniuses.
They’re not more talented or more insightful.
They’re simply carried by the network:

• instant context
• perfect recall
• probabilistic nudges
• automated judgement
• synthesised meaning

They’re not superhuman, they’re super-resourced.

If that’s the future AI points toward, the real divide becomes: Who has access to collective intelligence, and who doesn’t.

Living Unaugmented in a World Built for the Augmented

The protagonist isn’t just behind. They’re in a different cognitive economy.

The entire world assumes augmentation. Conversations move faster (actually instant and silent). Decisions rely on shared context. References happen in real-time. Everyone’s driven by a goal our protagonist is literally not on their wavelength.

Being the lone unboosted human is like running a marathon where everyone else has an e-bike. You’re technically in the same race, but practically you’re in a different sport.

This is where AI is pushing us. If everyone else is using AI for debugging, planning, summarising, testing, designing, and scaffolding, the gap isn’t skill - it’s infrastructure.

The Emotional Reality of Being Unboosted

Pluribus nails the emotional side:

• Out of sync
• Confused by others’ confidence
• Blind to patterns everyone else sees
• Constantly, unknowingly behind

This mirrors the early anxiety people feel today when they don’t use AI and others do. You see LinkedIn posts lashing out and spelling the demise of AI tools.

My take?

Collective Intelligence Doesn’t Add - It Multiplies

There will be two types of software engineer (or any knowledge worker for that matter), those who use AI and the unemployable. The power in Pluribus isn’t individual intelligence; it’s coordination.

The augmented don’t just know more. They share:

• Memory
• Context
• Reasoning
• Risk awareness
• Optimisation

This is the big one for engineering teams. AI doesn’t just speed you up, it harmonises teams. Imagine everyone having the same recall of past decisions, incidents, code, architecture, and context.

That’s collective intelligence.
That’s the Pluribus world.
That’s where we’re headed.

When Collective Intelligence Becomes Infrastructure, Autonomy Gets Strange

Once the species’ knowledge and reasoning becomes ubiquitous infrastructure, competence stops being about innate ability. It becomes a connectivity state.

The protagonist’s problem isn’t skill - it’s infinite network latency. They are unaugmented in an augmented world. They’re not dumb. They’re disconnected.

And in a world where everyone else is connected, disconnection looks like incompetence.

So What Do We Do With This?

AI ubiquity won’t make us obsolete.
It will make us interdependent.

Human value shifts from:

• memorising
• grinding
• manually orchestrating

To:

• judging wisely
• designing systems
• understanding humans
• handling ambiguity
• coordinating across complexity

Pluribus is, in a way, the canary in the cognitive coal mine. Showing us what happens when the baseline of society rises without everyone rising with it.

AI becomes the environment.
AI becomes the infrastructure.
AI becomes the collective brain we all get to borrow from.

And the show quietly asks:

What happens to the people who get left out of the collective intelligence?