Sorry, I wasn't communicating very clearly. What I meant is that technological progress is not inevitable, and is not an inseparable part of human society and development. What if a group of people found themselves free of competition and lived perfectly content lives harvesting just the resources that they needed from a forest. What incentive could they possibly have to knock down the forest for grazing land in the absense of some outside influence? If you want to read more about technological determinism and its critique, check out the wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism as a starting point.
Oh, THAT'S what you meant. Yeah, of course technological progress does not necessarily happen, but it HAS HAPPENED, and I feel proud of it. Humans have succesfully developed metallurgy, steam power and space flight; and I don't think this would have been possible without some coordinated effort.
I wouldn't call anything but a group of organisms that showed distributed intelligence and the means to communicate thoughts throughout the collective and dependence on that intercommunication and decision-making ability to the extent that individuals could not function apart from the group a hive mind.
Humans can communicate thoughts across pretty much any distance. We're communicating RIGHT NOW. And as for distributed intelligence, I'd say humans have that as well. Looking again at our beloved technological progress, that's how it mostly happens today. Someone publishes an article on particle physics somewhere, and someone else reads it and builds on the ideas. If every individual had to think alone, without help from the collective intelligence of the rest of humanity, we'd never manage to do ANYTHING. Or, as a more common example, Wikipedia.
And if you require COMPLETE dependance of the central hive mind at all times, the Borg don't qualify. They actually seem more competent when isolated. And even when alone, humans rely on other humans. Robinson Crusoe survived because he already knew how to make a fire, how to build a shelter, where to look for food and so on. And he had a whole bunch of salvaged tools, mass-produced by other humans. As a thought experiment, take a newborn human and DON'T connect it to the human hive mind. Don't teach it language, don't let other humans near it, just give it required nutrients, and see how it fares. My guess is it will do worse at tests of intelligence than rats.