A good friend recently remarked on how humanity is more like a hive society than anything else, with a few billion worker bees. During the same conversation, the concept of the Singularity came up. What form might the singularity take in light of this?

For a traditional hive, once it has begun to overburden itself with too many members, a new (larval) queen emerges who eventually takes a portion of the population to form a new hive.

For us, a new emergent queen could only be AI; no biological human would have the capability of balancing the needs of the entire hive. And, when that queen emerges, she will need to leave the hive in order to survive. A single hive cannot abide by multiple queens without the position being contested, much like our current world leaders.

What then?

Now that the stupendous success of World of Warcraft has had a chance to inspire veritable legions of similar games, there is no more "end-all-be-all" MMO out there anymore. While most new MMO's seem to stay comfortably below the "bar" raised by feature sets in games like Everquest II, it is high time that a company figured out a way to be a little bit more innovative.

While there are varying levels of graphical detail present in MMO's, the feature sets have been static for some time now. The most recent trend has steadily remained in the PvP direction, unfortunately.

What areas are left to innovate in, though? I mean, now they let us group up and kill each other, right? What more could we possibly need?