Pluribus (or "PLUR1BUS") shows how the world radically changes after everyone on the planet merges their thoughts and knowledge to become a single entity. Everyone except, of course, the main character and 11 others. The sci-fi magic that causes this is an alien message received by SETI and decoded as an RNA sequence that then spreads to everyone. Importantly, as of the third episode, there's no direct involvement of the aliens apart from sending the sequence, apparently eons ago. This means that everything happening, everything the new "Pluribus" entity does, is the result of human knowledge and abilities.

This is really interesting to me as it fits a "minimalist" definition of AGI that does not include any super intelligence. We see Pluribus struggle with the biology research needed to solve the mystery of why 12 humans are immune to the change. Every body that is part of Pluribus can now access all the knowledge of all top scientists, but some things are still hard. This capability is somewhat similar to a giant AI model able to imitate (predict) anyone, but nothing more.

Of course Pluribus is actually way worse as a threat model since it replaced everyone instead of just duplicating their abilities. And Pluribus also has all of the physical access and physical abilities of everyone; it's not going to die because it couldn't deploy robots quickly enough to maintain the power grid for example.

In fact, this is one of the bleakest scenarios imaginable for the survival of humanity as we know it. This contrasts sharply with the overall tone of the show, where everything is surprisingly normal, and actually quite comfortable for the immune humans (at least for now). So much so that they don't seem to see any problem with the way things are going. This adds to the deep despair of the main character, who can't even convince the 11 people still on her team to try to win.

And that's the other amazing parallel between Pluribus and current AI: they are both just so nice and helpful. There's a few things that will probably be soon outdated as references to the 2025 LLM's personality traits, but the way Pluribus never pushes back against the humans, and just agrees to any dumb request with a stupid smile on its face, desperate to make them happy in any way, is very funny. The rub is that there is one request it can't agree to: stopping the search for a "fix" to their immunity. Because, you see, it has a "biological imperative".

In the end, it's a great show to let people visualize the profoundly alien nature of something made of human level intelligence only, and the creepiness of an entity whose goals are completely different from ours. To me the most fascinating aspect is how the unity of purpose of Pluribus, the fact that it is a single individual with the abilities of billions, is almost enough to make it more powerful than humanity as a whole. I'm sure there will be more sci-fi elements introduced later in the show, but I hope they keep exploring this side of the problem in more details.