The question that's screaming at me right now is that if humans used specialization + cooperation to achieve global dominance, what happens when you pair unlimited global masterminds + cooperation?
Best case scenario is you get The Culture where society is ruled by hyper-intelligent but kind and benevolent AIs that solve all economic problems and that keep a population of quadrillions of very happy, healthy, and rich humans as pets.
As bandwidth is still crap my bet would be that, like with humans, the sum of the parts isn't greater than the greatest mastermind in the group or it will take an increasingly long time to come up with increasingly original thought. If it scales reasonably linear it would be worth waiting for a year or a decade to produce a single result.
Also a funny thought, with enough of a mind it should be able to figure out how to get very limited storage and barely usable computation at very low speed out of some extremely cheap substrate. Something like growing salt crystals in a lake (or ocean) Have a write pump flashing a light onto salt water and a read pump discarding undesirable results to be overwritten. You know, like, it doesn't matter if you encode randomly, if you do it often enough you will get the entire set. You don't have to read accurately either, as long as you get at least some results out.
