system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Trek] Why are the Borg so bad at multi-tasking?

This is something I always wondered. I would think that the strength of the Borg Collective is that you have the processing power of millions of minds working on multiple tasks all being directed from a single source. But every time we see the Borg, they really only seem to be good at doing one thing at a time. 

In the very first encounter between the Federation and the Borg, they only do one task at a time. They send a single drone to scout the Enterprise. He barely defends himself, and when he is shot down they immedietly send another one in his place. They then begin the aim of capturing the Enterprise, but as soon as the Enterprise fights back and does some damage, they stop attacking and focus solely on repairing, even to the point of ignoring intruders from the Enterprise on board.

We see this again following the battle of Wolf 359. As soon as Picard issues the "sleep" command, it overrides all other commands and they stop their attack immedietly. Again during the First Contact encounter, the Borg completely ignore the Starfleet strike teams, armed to the hilt with modulating phaser rifles, until they are in a position to interfere with their current goal.

A 20th century PC is better at multitasking than these guys. How come?
gpt
Imagine people as computers. Each one has a different lineage of manufacturers and vintages; and consequently has different firmware, OS with a long history and different quirks that evolve because of variation in installed software. The differences mean that when faced with a problem there can be a variety of solutions. There may be 16 different word processors each with different strengths and weaknesses and 9 different browsers and 99 different spreadsheet programs and various permutations and which ones. Any exploit will only affect some of the machines and the rest live on.

The Borg Collective would be forcefully overwriting the firmware with the same one for all machines and putting a OS image on that wipes every night and re-images. There is no variation except in the base hardware and even then the sys-admin tries very hard to make that consistent. The hive mind may have billions of entities in it but they are all essentially the same person that reacts the same to the same stimuli. There is 1 word processor, 1 browser and 1 spreadsheet program. Find a exploit in 1 and you can compromise every machine.

They suffer the further problem of being uncreative. They don't seem to discover technology for themselves; they only steal it. Their 'adaptation' is more scanning their impressive memory of stolen technologies to find one that might be appropriate and apply it to the current problem. They don't seem to actually think ahead or innovate.

In a way it separates the Borg from natural selection because of the homogeneity of thought and structure. While they 'adapt' to problems they've already experience they've destroyed their own ability to adapt to things they haven't seen severely limiting their ability to deal with the universe.

So basically they don't really learn; they do the same thing over and over and if doesn't work they don't ever come up with new idea's. Single file drone zerging is the only strategy they know and they won't ever get any new ideas because of the weakness of their systems; they forcefully homogenize new members and remove non technical knowledge that way. As soon as a civilization exceeds them in key technologies they will likely dismantle the collective and the collective will just send drones in single file to address the problem.


**Addendum/TLDR**: Essentially the Borg are billions of the same person; thus they uni-task because it's really just one person who isn't too smart and is fixated on stealing technology. They can't think outside that box.