I don’t think that the intelligence you’re describing is the, if you’ll forgive me, old chestnut “we built it, then it outgrew us!”. That is, it’s not separate from us, and it’s not leaving us behind.

Nor would I call something like this an “Artificial Intelligence”. It’s quite organic, as I see it, literally carbon–based: an emergent property of the linking of fundamentally social primates in technologically-juiced “social networks”. It isn’t gust the information flow, or even the flow of those cursed memes. It’s the constant behavioral and emotional cues that give the Internet culture some of the properties of a flock of birds.

As if, through faster and higher bandwidth connections, we’re evolving from our low-bandwidth ocial primate roots into a social structure as tightly bound as a school of fish.

[everybody take a drink, I brought up primatology!]

You know what that is, hank? That right there is socialism, socialism RUN AMOK, I tell you! Kill the Internet!

Of course, there’s socialism, and then there’s socialism. When a demagogue takes control of the social network–as Hitler took control of Germany’s rudimentary social networks–it becomes some monster like national socialism.

Or, today, as the Tyrrangutang has taken hold of a primary social network, we see the synonym of national socialism, white nationalism.

Any unprotected social network is vulnerable to corruption, as Hitler did in the pre-Internet era. In another thread you discounted the idea that technology can effect behavioral changes, but I disagree with that too. Or rather, as I’ve said here, technology can amplify or moderate behavior. The point is, there’s no putting the networking technology genie back in the bottle. Now that we’ve experience some of its dangers, its time to think about how to build in protections. Maybe something like the cutoff switches in stock exchanges that shut things down when they detect runaway trading. I’m thinking about the problem, anyway.