Brain Adaptation or Apocalypse?

The New York Times’ Idea of the Day Blog recently led us to an interesting article in the Atlantic discussing the complex predictions of “intelligence augmentation” and how our species will adapt to exponential information with faster cognitive abilities.  Author Jamais Cascio examines the history of human intelligence and argues that as our information filtering abilities increase it will be inevitable to experiment and then utilize technologies to make you smarter.

While an article in the Atlantic from last summer argues that Google is making us stupid, Cascio argues this summer that Google is making us smarter by providing an efficient way to manage all the information swirling around us.  Instead of predicting an apocalyptic robot future, the future will simply be a series of incremental changes that build on growing technologies.

This flow of inevitability is discussed at length in the Atlantic and is definitely worth a read:

When people hear the phrase intelligence augmentation, they tend to envision people with computer chips plugged into their brains, or a genetically engineered race of post-human super-geniuses. Neither of these visions is likely to be realized, for reasons familiar to any Best Buy shopper. In a world of on­going technological acceleration, today’s cutting-edge brain implant would be tomorrow’s obsolete junk—and good luck if the protocols change or you’re on the wrong side of a “format war” (anyone want a Betamax implant?). And then there’s the question of stability: Would you want a chip in your head made by the same folks that made your cell phone, or your PC?

But while the concept remains controversial, I see no good argument for why a mind running on a machine platform instead of a biological platform will forever be impossible; whether one might appear in five years or 50 or 500, however, is uncertain. I lean toward 50, myself. That’s enough time to develop computing hardware able to run a high-speed neural network as sophisticated as that of a human brain, and enough time for the kids who will have grown up surrounded by virtual-world software and household robots—that is, the people who see this stuff not as “Technology,” but as everyday tools—to come to dominate the field.

The Atlantic: “Get Smarter” / [via NYT] / [image via Flickr user: lapolab]