Artificial Intelligentsia
From: Atlantic Monthly - 10/2006 - Vol. 298, No. 3, P. 146
By: James Fallows

Debate is brewing over whether the Internet is nurturing a form of artificial
intelligence through the group efforts of bloggers, editors, and other
Internet users, whose individual pursuits are collectively creating a vast,
impartial, and multidisciplinary knowledge base. Atlantic Monthly
correspondent James Fallows expects two significant achievements--spot
knowledge retrieval via the embedding of computing power in everyday objects
and machine-created categorization--to have an ultimately beneficial effect
on human beings' cognitive capabilities. With spot recall, people will be
able to retrieve any piece of information whenever they wish, while
categorization will give them a leg up in recognizing patterns in the data.
Fallows writes that these capabilities will be a mental version of
eyeglasses, enhancing the lives of people whose memory fades as they get
older. "For those without such problems, these new tools could, while perhaps
less immediately essential, yet become the modern-day equivalent of the steam
engine or the plow--tools that free people from routine chores and give them
more time to think, dream, and live," the author concludes. At the same time,
Fallows acknowledges sympathy with technology essayist Jaron Lanier, who
warned in the online publication Edge that collective intelligence would have
an effect similar to political collectivism in its stifling of innovation and
creativity. 

Read the article abstract at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200610/fallows-tech

Links:
Making humanity more intelligent
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/09/making-humanity-more-intelligent.html