The reason Belkin's article brought this fact to mind for me was that it is a stark reminder of how quickly technology has changed us as a species just in the last 100 years. Advancements in medicine, education, transport, all of this has allowed us to live longer and procreate more. It's an extraordinary achievement, whether or not you believe it is actually a good thing or not.
At first reading, the suggestion that "The internet will speed up human evolution" seems preposterous. But Belkin's argument is compelling and comes from a theory about the very start of evolution, when single-celled organisms (or orgasms, as poor Liberal backbencher Jason Wood said the other day!) joined together, to create multi-celled organisms. He suggests that the internet is enabling a similar merger to occur, but on a far greater level. The merger of human and computer intelligence, the creation of "a human-computer meta-network".
Improvements in communication have snowballed and accelerated developments in other scientific and cultural areas, the speed at which new technology is created can be seen as exponential, thus technology can be said to be adding to human's intelligence and therefore helping us to evolve. This much is easy to understand. But Belkin takes it one step further, saying "the merging of humans into an interconnected computer meta-network will eventually create a collective consciousness for all the individual participants."
Although I agree with the basis of his argument, Belkin's meta-network concept is hard for me to fathom. It sounds like an individual would have to sacrifice their own individuality and give themselves over to a new level of consciousness - like a Buddhist meditation but with computers. Perhaps my concerns can be seen as an extension of my concerns about existing technologies, such as Facebook, which, as previously discussed, I am uncomfortable using because I don't want to share that much of myself with this world. It could be suggested, therefore, that Belkin's idea is not ridiculous, because millions of people around the world are already prepared to give up some part of themselves and share it via the net.
Looking into the future, I also can't help but wonder whether some form of technology will beat us in the end. Not in the form of robots taking over the world, as Belkin mentions, but more in the form of some new aggressive mobile phone cancer, or all the radio waves pulsing around in the air shrinking our brains!
On that note, I would like to end on something more cheery. Please enjoy Flight of the Conchords with their Robot song...
