(*****)I'm prompted to write this, my first post, after all the debate that's sprung up recently on this topic. Ray Kurzweil and others talk about the 'Singularity', when machine intelligence far surpasses that of humans. Others focus on 'Intelligence Augmentation' - when billions of humans are hooked up in ways cleverly augmented by technology. I was really disappointed to have only just heard about the 'Accelerating Change' conference on this last month.
A lot of this misses some key questions, I think, on both sides of the debate. First, where will all the future superintelligent computing horsepower come from? What will it initially be built to do, and what does that imply about its behavior? On the other side, how does 'Intelligence Augmentation' change human-to-human interactions, in particular as more and more machine intelligence is involved, and as humans get more used to using it?
At risk of seeming too grounded in the now, I think the answers overlap. People will spend money to buy technology that meets their goals, personal or business. Applications in other words. Increasingly they use those apps to access services... and to communicate with other people (who have their own apps). Increasingly though - and this is the interesting part - more and more communication will be happening between the apps, without the humans even being aware of it. This is something I think the 'blognoscenti' tend to miss.
Think of diplomatic sherpas preparing the way for a summit meeting of leaders. Or Sigourney Weaver in Alien, strapped into the robot suit, fighting the Alien queen. In both cases, you've got power and effort that's effecting the will of the person driving it, but magnifying many times over the capabilities and resources that they personally could bring to bear. Over time, these things become second nature to those who use them often, the way a skillful musician's instrument can come to seem an extension of themselves.
I'd suggest that this massively-augmented and connected human brain is more the model for the future. The wetware doesn't need to evolve at all I think, genetically, for us to adapt to these vastly enhanced capabilities, and behave as if we've always had them. (Which will be the case for our children/grandchildren).
More subtle, perhaps, are the ways in which this world lets us treat thinking capacity anywhere outside our heads as an extension of our own brains - whether it ultimately comes from other human beings, the computers in the middle, or some fuzzy combination of the two.
There's a notion you hear that people in the "post-Singularity world" will be left comprehending no more of what's going on than could a goldfish of this discussion. But seeing each humans as a "will", massively enhanced in this way, leads me to see that notion as flawed.
In thinking about our inability to comprehend an intelligence vastly greater than our own, a rather different kind of analogy comes to mind. That is, to think of ourselves individually as ants in a colony, or neurons in a brain. The whole here, of course, being the collective intelligence of human civilization. It's hard to even think about parameters that would define such an emergent intelligence. The word 'civilization' itself could be taken to be such a reference... but that's been around a long time. How to think about the changes that computers and the Internet represent, at that scale? Hard of course, especially since we're just ants/neurons.
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