nautil.us | A more optimistic view would expect us to learn the cultural habits
of being part of a collective intelligence—better able to share, listen,
or take turns. It would hope too that we can learn the wisdom to cope
with opposites—to understand suspicion as necessary for truth, fear for
hope, and surveillance for freedom.
It’s
tempting to link possible future evolutions of collective intelligence
to what we already know of evolution. John Maynard Smith and Eörs
Szathmary offered one of the best summaries of these processes when they
described the eight main transitions in the evolution of complexity in
life. These were the shift from chromosomes to multicellular organisms,
prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, plants to animals, and simple to sexual
reproduction. Every transition involved a new form of cooperation and
interdependence (so that things that before the transition could
replicate independently, afterward could only replicate as “part of a
larger whole”), and new kinds of communication, ways of both storing and
transmitting information.
It’s entirely plausible that future
evolutions of intelligence will have comparable properties—with new
forms of cooperation and interdependence along with new ways of handling
communication that bring with them deeper understanding of both the
outer as well as inner world. The idea of an evolution of consciousness
is both obvious and daunting. It is obvious that consciousness does
evolve and can in the future. But social science fears speculation, and
much that has been written on this theme is either abstract or empty. We
see in films and novels visions of machines with dramatically enhanced
capacities to calculate, observe, and respond. They may be benign or
malign (they’re more interesting when they are evil), but we can grasp
their implications when we see them scanning emotions on faces, shooting
down swarms of attacking missiles, or manipulating complex networks to
direct people.
