The Technological Singularity as the Emergence of a Collective Consciousness: An Anthropological Perspective

1. Introduction

This article presents an alternative model of artificial intelligence (AI) and the so-called technological singularity: a point in time when machines either become “awake” through runaway intelligence or humans biologically integrate with machines and enter a new stage of existence. It is argued that the technological singularity does not represent either of these but instead the process of human thought converging into a collective consciousness facilitated by machines. This type of soft singularity began tens of thousands of years ago with the first cave paintings, expedited through the inventions of writing and the printing press, and eventually achieved a critical mass with the development of the communications satellite. The latter connected events and ideas to vast swaths of humanity, compressing the time to relay information from days and hours to minutes and seconds.

Since then, the development of the internet and advancements in AI have only fast-tracked this process. AI will continue to increase in intelligence but whether that intelligence results in a conscious machine remains a subject of debate. Prominent figures from the world of technology have suggested that such an event is unlikely in the near future given the complexity of human cognition and our limited understanding of it (Allen & Greaves, 2011). One could (and perhaps should) be skeptical of claims downplaying AI capabilities by individuals and corporations that potentially stand to profit from their development. But whether or not such an event will happen is not the point of this article. What is, though, is the impact AI is having on the increase in the speed of communication, rates of connectivity, and time spent online, all of which, it is argued, have hastened the convergence of a collective consciousness. AI represents a means to that end, not necessarily an end in itself.

Two different aspects of technological innovation and artificial intelligence are discussed. The first examines the aforementioned singularity as a process moving humanity toward a collective consciousness as opposed to an event or point in time whereby computers gain consciousness in their own right. Specifically, it is argued that the slow march of innovations from symbolic representations on cave walls to early telecommunications brought disparate ideas to those in a neighboring valley or across an ocean. Due to the limitations of space, a circumscribed number of innovations are covered, specifically those related to communication. What this march in communicative technologies ultimately resulted in was the development of the communications satellite that hastened the singularity process. The subsequent development of AI and the rapid increase in computer power have made this consciousness perhaps all the more inevitable, but AI is merely the latest, and perhaps last, innovation in this process.

The second part of the article examines the implications of our increasing reliance on technology and the likely path forward as we continue to shrink the gap between messenger and receiver. It is demonstrated that as technological innovations over the millennia have increased message speed between individuals, the physical distance between innovations and the human brain has decreased. Yet, these advances, and specifically online applications, may actually be hampering cognitive and linguistic functions as technologies become easier to use and the breadth of information and users increases. In short, AI has expanded the things individuals can be exposed to, but that exposure is increasingly superficial given the sheer amount of information available and time needed to process it.

2. Collective Consciousness and Soft Singularities

In the social sciences, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1893/1933) is perhaps best known for his work on collective consciousness and how different types of societies maintain order through mechanical and organic solidarity: mechanical solidarity found in small, less complex societies with a high degree of homogeneity that ensures common beliefs and a muting of the individual in favor of the group; organic solidarity found in complex, heterogeneous societies with distinct divisions of labor that elevate individual consciousness as separate from a collective identity. Other researchers have examined the formation and impact of a collective consciousness through the examination of games and wagers group members engage in (Geertz, 1973), the symbolic power of flags and their effect of communicating togetherness and physical dominance (Shanafelt, 2008), as well as the influence of living patterns on spatial relationships and a community’s worldview (O’Gorman 2010).

The idea of consciousness being a transitional process can be traced back to William James’s (1890) ground-breaking work, The Principles of Psychology. “It then appears,” wrote James,

that the main end of our thinking is at all times the attainment of some other substantive part than the one from which we have just been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusion to another. (p. 243).

Thus, if we reconsider the technological singularity model from the strong version where computers gain consciousness in their own right to a type of soft version where a collective consciousness is facilitated among users, we are encapsulating a process inexorably linked to our species’ reliance on tools to transmit information. If an individual’s stream of consciousness, as James famously called it, is continuously moving from one state to another, then technological innovations represent the process of honing the consciousness of the many into a singular confluence.

Where the strong singularity model differs most is in its emphasis on a point in time when all that happened before will be fundamentally different from what happens after. The futurist Ray Kurzweil is probably best known for this version of the technological singularity through his writings and cofounding of the Singularity University, a think tank and investment group that offers educational programs and innovation summits. Kurzweil (2005) theorizes that machines will gain consciousness somewhere around 2045, ushering in a posthuman race that are capable of overcoming the effects of aging, illness, and other human limitations. This transhumanist view is shared by many who display a religious-like belief in an age when man outgrows his strictly biological form as the incorporation of technology within our bodies becomes not only foreseeable but inescapable. These so-called transitional humans will be a mere stage in humanity’s path toward posthumanism and will be so far advanced that they can no longer be definitively called human by our current definition (Elliot, 2003). Others foresee minds being uploaded into computers, eliminating physical bodies altogether, provided, of course, that consciousness and that which makes us, us, could be uploaded as well (Chalmers, 2010).

As noted, these strong versions of the singularity are juxtaposed against my soft version, or the process of technological advancements that are heading for a continuous and pan-human connectivity, compressing space between individuals in terms of the time in which communication takes place. Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired magazine, described a soft singularity as similar to the invention of language. “When humanoids invented language,” Kelly notes,

they could not see that world after language . . . It may be very difficult to understand what happens on the other side of once we have a global connection of 7 billion people and 7 trillion machines and AIs all connected together, that there may be things that happen at that level that we are not even aware of or can’t even be aware of. (Burningham, 2016)

We could call this pan-connectivity different things; several terms have been popularly used to describe group members who use their individual intelligence to further the goals of the group, most notably “swarm intelligence” and “collective intelligence.” Such examples are readily found in nature from the murmuration and initiating movements of bird species, stigmergic behavior in nest-building wasps, to movement between hives and colonies in bees and ants (Garnier et al., 2007; Hayes, 2011; Langridge et al., 2008; Ramseyer et al., 2009; Visscher & Seeley, 2007).

Within the human realm, Rosenberg (2015) defines such groupings as a “unified dynamic system” with “collective behavior tightly coordinated by real-time feedback loops.” This not only implies teamwork, collective deliberation, and goal orientation (Blee, 2013; Rosenberg & Willcox, 2018) but also flexibility, robustness, and self-organization (Bonabeau & Meyer, 2000). Acting as a massive computational system where its constituent components function in parallel, a collective intelligence is capable of surviving when faced with disturbances due to its high redundancy (Beni, 2004).

Examples of operational collective intelligence include freedom of input in open-source software, tapping into broader problem-solving capabilities of users (Garzarelli & Fontanella, 2011; Krause et al., 2009); individuals’ use of quorum thresholds in decision making that reflect the accuracy of social information gained from high- and low-performing groups (Kurvers et al., 2014); as well as group cohesion and its influence on a “group mind,” collective action, and collective responsibility (Waytz & Young, 2012). Collective action through information and communication technologies at one time leads to narrow interest groups (Leibold, 2011) but also “smart mobs” (Rheingold, 2004) that can be spurned quickly and work together. Castells (2013) summarizes this process well, noting that

we have gone from a communication characterized by the emission of messages from a source to many receivers, with little interactivity, to a communication in which multiple senders send messages to multiple receivers, so that we are all transmitters and receivers at the same time. (p. 8)

There is the potential issue of getting too bogged down in synonyms over what essentially describes the same thing, and my use of collective consciousness is not meant to be the definitive descriptor. Rather, it is more in line with the idea of a body of individuals connected through technology that have the potential to engage with one another, taking into consideration population density as hubs will naturally occur wherever there is a concentration of people coalescing around common interests (Toret & Calleja-López, 2014). The distinction I make between a collective intelligence and a collective consciousness is that the latter exists independently of a specific goal or objective commonly associated with the former. However, a collective consciousness would include hubs that pursue specific aims utilizing their constituent members’ collective intelligence. These differences notwithstanding, the central theme remains the same: the increasing agglomeration of individuals connected through innovations that decrease the time in which message and messenger converge.

3. Message Compression Through Technological Innovation

3.1. Message Compression

More than 150,000 civilians and soldiers lay dead, strewn about the capital city of Kalinga. The kingdom had resisted the Indian invasion of 262 BC but to no avail. City after city lay sacked with the capital finally left in ruins. They fell to the crushing invasion led by King Ashoka, third ruler of India’s Mauryan Empire, a violent and warring leader who had risen to power by way of killing his siblings. The fall and carnage of Kalinga was said to be so great, though, that it forced Ashoka to contemplate the nature of human suffering, eventually turning to Buddhism, which had been spreading over northern India since its inception several centuries prior. Ashoka renounced his warring ways and set about spreading Buddhist teachings throughout his realm. He did this through one of the great monumental evangelizing campaigns in history, erecting temples and pillars across his empire etched with moral edicts and sending out Buddhist missionaries to Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Sri Lanka. Despite the fact that Buddhism did not maintain a lasting presence (apart from Sri Lanka), his pillars and monuments with their Buddhist-inspired moral underpinnings remain to this day.

Ashoka’s efforts reflected other rulers of the past who etched their victories and laudatory righteousness on monumental architecture across their domains, solidifying their rule and ensuring that their beliefs held prominence. But his pillars also represented a more dynamic platform brought to the masses as opposed to sites of pilgrimage. Through bridging the gaps between individuals while ensuring the accuracy of his message, Ashoka’s pillars helped shape people’s worldviews through expressions of ideology, memory recollection, and identity construction in ways that news from itinerant travelers could not (Knapp, 2009).

But a messenger and his message need an audience as the ability to influence is dependent on the number of people reached. Throughout history, the power to reach increasingly large numbers of individuals has expanded with every innovation. Those that extended our ability to pass on information via graphic communication (cave paintings, figurines, totems), written communication (pictographs, writing, paper, the printing press), and auditory and visual communication (radio, telephones, television) forever changed how we interacted with each other and the broader environment we lived in (Figure 1) . In short, these communicative innovations lessened the distance between individuals through conveying information about the world around them, such as the animals they hunted and the battles they fought, and abstract ideas such as the nature of reality, the existence of God, and life after death.

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Figure 1.

Innovation, distance traveled, travel time: Writing to the telegraph.

Nestorian Christians reached Changan (modern Xi’an), China, the capital of the Tang Dynasty, in 635 CE. A stone stele excavated in the city in 1625 but dated to 781 CE states that the Hebrew Bible was translated into Chinese, however, the stele itself does not contain any biblical translations (Chen, 2005). The printing press, one of the most important innovations in human history, compressed the centuries it took for written literature to travel into a matter of years. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense written in 1776 was printed and widely read throughout colonial America and Europe. It was translated into French and printed in Paris by Antoine-Gilbert Griffet de Labaume in 1791, although handwritten copies were available in France prior to then. Abraham Lincoln’s first State of the Union address on December 3, 1861 was relayed from Washington, DC, to New York City in a little over an hour and a half. The next day, The New York Times reported that it was “a feat of telegraphing unparalleled in the Old or New World” (“The Telegraph and the Message,” 1861). By 1883, use of the telegraph was so widespread that news of the eruption of Krakatoa, Indonesia was transmitted around the world in hours.

With each advance and conveyance of greater levels of information, people were able to relay ideas to those in neighboring regions, across continents, or generations into the future. The net result was and is a dialogue of increasing complexity and duration involving an increasing number of interlocutors. A symbol or text engenders a reaction, discussion, and a response. The greater the reach of a message, the greater the potential for a reaction. As greater numbers were achieved, a shrinking of the cognitive space between individuals continued apace until a critical mass of information was shared with an equally critical number of people in a matter of minutes. That critical mass occurred with the construction and launch of the communications satellite.

3.2. Fast-Tracking a Collective Consciousness

In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke, then a former British air force officer, published a paper on “extraterrestrial radio relays” that described how satellites could be utilized to establish a global telecommunications system. Clarke’s idea was for a geostationary space station to enter a special orbit where it would circle the Earth exactly once a day, neither losing altitude nor floating off into space. At 35,870 kilometers (22,230 miles) with a g-force exactly 0.22 m/s,² it would essentially be an extremely high radio tower. Three such stations positioned at this altitude equally spaced above the equator could connect the entire world, save the polar ice caps (Ippolito & Pelton, 2014).

On July 10, 1962, Clarke’s vision became reality when Telstar I, a communications satellite developed by AT&T in partnership with Bell Laboratories, a nascent NASA, and agencies in the United Kingdom and France, became the first to successfully transmit television images, telephone, and telegraph messages, and a transatlantic television stream. A month later and a year after President Kennedy called on nations of the world to participate in a global satellite system, the U.S. Congress passed the Communications Satellite Act, committing the United States to that same goal. In 1963, the Satellite Communications Corporations (COMSAT) was formed, followed a year later by the joining of COMSAT with other nations’ communication bodies in the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (TELSAT) to provide worldwide coverage. By 1965, the first commercial satellite, INTELSAT I (also known as “Early Bird”), provided telecommunication service between the United States and Europe (Edelson & Pollack, 1977).

Fearing the image of satellite technology being a rich countries club, in 1966 U.S. President Lyndon Johnson issued the National Security Action Memorandum No. 342. The Act ordered the U.S. State Department to take a proactive role in providing assistance to select developing nations to construct earth stations for receiving satellite transmissions, partly to disseminate educational and health information, combat illiteracy, and teach agricultural methods but also to counter propaganda from the Soviet Union (Slotten, 2002). The INTELSAT system was mirrored by domestic systems that provided coverage to regions, cities, and even individuals, and later the inclusion of the MARISAT (maritime satellite) system on ocean going vessels, and AEROSAT (air satellite) system for aircraft traveling international routes (Edelson & Pollack, 1977). In 1977, there were four operational satellites and four spares with 150 stations in 80 countries traversing more than 500 flight paths around the world. By 2017, the number of satellites rose to 1,738.

In 1974, UNESCO commissioned a report outlining many of the potential benefits and problems of satellite television. The domination of a particular language, educational levels of audiences, as well as standards of professionalism ranked among the concerns, as did deeper and potentially more serious issues such as social and cultural misinterpretations, propaganda, and the spread of objectionable standards of behavior (Martelanc, 1974). Indeed, the impact of satellite television has arguably been greatest in the developing world where policy makers have struggled with competing arguments regarding the utopian value of greater information and the dystopian realities of what that information and corresponding influence may entail (Contractor et al., 1988).

What the 1974 UNESCO report correctly identified, though, was the increase in the speed of acculturation between countries transmitting television signals and those receiving them, as well as the developmental lag between countries (Martelanc, 1974). From a sociological perspective, the growth of satellite television has led to a cornucopia of social changes, including the improvement in the quantity and quality of information (Manchanda, 1998); challenge for control over content in regions with long histories of authoritarian rule (Conte, 2007; Horan, 2010); exposure and education regarding women’s rights (Tunio & Shoukat, 2015); and criticism of cultural change and challenges to traditional authority said to stem from exposure to Western media (Devadas & Ravi, 2013; Ghaysvandi & Mostafaei, 2013). However, one would be remiss in thinking that satellite television’s impact has not similarly produced unintended results in developed countries. Within the United States, for instance, satellite television’s impact on parenting in the 1980s coincided with a child-kidnapping scare that, when combined with smaller families and the increased age of first-time parents, likely contributed to the modern trend of “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and “microaggressions” across university campuses (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015).

The precursors of satellite television such as UHF (ultra-high frequency) and VHF (very high frequency) could be received regionally and bounced between line-of-sight receivers but could not be transmitted across oceans. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 against Hungary’s socialist government and its vicious destruction by the Soviet Union, for example, sent understandable shockwaves throughout the world. But televised pictures were not live as they had to be taped and sent to television stations for broadcasting. Stations in the United States had to wait until the tapes were delivered by airplane. The time it would take in the interim was affected by human and environmental conditions: how fast individuals could copy the existing material and deliver those materials to couriers, weather conditions affecting couriers’ movements, and so on. By the time of the moon landing in 1969, people could tune in at a specified time regardless of where they were and watch the event as it happened (or at least within the slight delay it took for images to travel from the moon to Earth).

Both the Hungarian uprising and the moon landing were broadcasted on radio and television. The difference between the two mediums, however, is profound and cannot be overstated. Both are conveying information, but whereas the former exists in the “theatre of the mind” and requires our imagination to fill the gaps normally occupied by pictures, television does the mind’s heavy lifting for it, infusing words with images and creating a sense of reality audio alone is incapable of achieving.

When tabulated together, we can see how our earliest graphic innovations—cave paintings (yellow line)—reach the lowest numbers of people over the greatest amount of time (Figure 2). The oldest known cave paintings date back to at least 40,000 years ago, ¹ but the number of individuals who have actually seen them (outside of exposure through popular media) is miniscule. ² There are likely still many more undiscovered cave paintings around the world that have not been looked on by another human being since their creator first brought them into existence eons ago. Writing (light blue dash), on the other hand, has reached far more people since its invention roughly 5,500 years ago. However, that number will always be limited by the fact that not everyone will learn how to read and write. Even though far more people are literate today than in the past, it has always been a skill of the educated and one that must be learned. Only 17% of the world remains illiterate today but that number was all but reversed 200 years ago when only 12% could read and write.

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Figure 2.

Innovation by year and number of people reached.

Telephones (green dash), since their invention in 1876, have reached individuals around the world, particularly with the advent of cellular phone technology, which has made their use and availability almost mundane. Today, there are more than 5 billion mobile phones in use. That number does not represent access to phones but individuals who have phones; the number of people who have access to any phone, mobile or otherwise, is likely considerably larger. But the communications satellite (purple dash) has had the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time. More than 500 million people watched the moon landing in 1969, a mere 7 years after the launch of the Telstar I satellite in 1962; more than 4 billion watched the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia. The internet (red dash) has had a slightly slower but no less dramatic reach since ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) became operational in 1969 and the creation of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. Currently, there are more than 7.6 billion internet users. As with the telephone and satellite television but unlike writing, the technical expertise required to utilize the internet has become almost nil as those with even a modicum of technological knowledge can navigate the web.

The communications satellite represented a paradigmatic shift in the breadth and speed in which information could be disseminated. Advances in AI since then have only further rooted our ability to receive and transmit complex information at ever-increasing rates. But if the communications satellite did, in fact, represent a new phase in the ongoing process of the technological singularity and construction of humanity’s collective consciousness, it is fair to question what the latter’s parameters are. That is, if humans can mediate action through their collective thoughts via technology, how will that mediation occur and what are its constraints, if any?

4. The Physical Limits of a Collective Consciousness

Kurzweil’s (2005) description of future experience-beaming technology seems to anticipate a collective consciousness at least on the experiential level. “The experience-beaming technology of 2029,” he writes

will enable the brain of one person to experience only the sensory experiences (and potentially some of the neurological correlates of emotions and other aspects of experience) of another person. But that will still not convey the same internal experience as that undergone by the person beaming the experience, because his or her brain is different. (Kurzweil, 2005, p. 278)

This seems to glide close to the orbit of Plato’s concept of ideal forms: We may experience the same empirical phenomena (that is, sensory data) as others in the future, but we will never know the feelings, images, recollections, and desires in another’s brain elicited by those phenomena.

But even setting aside internal experiences, there still remain issues of physicality and geography. If the internet ever became physically connected to our minds, and we could send our thoughts out instantaneously, there would still be a lag in data transference. That is, the speed at which a thought can move between two individuals not sharing the same brain but having two that are connected. The amount of time between an impulse in my brain to move my fingers and type these letters on my computer has a lag, however slight. So, too, will be the time it takes for that message to be received both near and far. The speed of light is the cosmic speed limit. Data transferred electronically, not matter how quickly, will still be governed by the laws of physics.

Gordon Moore, cofounder of the technology company Intel, predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors that can fit into an integrated circuit would double every 2 years, cutting the cost for each an advancement in half. Known as “Moore’s law,” the prediction has proved remarkably prescient: computing power goes up, cost goes down. Going forward in time with a new and more powerful internet protocol, we can expect an exponential increase that is almost impossible to fathom. “To put these exponential numbers into perspective,” Goodman and Khanna (2013) write, “we’re about to transition from an Internet the size of a golf ball to an Internet the size of the sun,” with even mundane objects such as chairs and trees having internet protocol addresses (p. 66).

But, again, this will reach a limit just as silicone microprocessors have a limit. Silicone can only withstand so much heat produced through microprocessors; messages can only go so fast over time and space even if everyone on the planet were connected in a type of collective superbrain. A brain-to-brain interface has been developed in lab rats that allow for the transfer of sensorimotor information (Pais-Vieira et al., 2013), but the physical limitations of transmitting complex information over great distances is something else entirely. This limitation was identified by Gordon Bell in 1972 in what became known as “Bell’s law of computer classes.” Bell’s law states that changes in processing power foreordained by Moore’s law give rise to new computer structures every 10 years resulting in the creation of a new industry: the vacuum tube, transistor computers, integrated circuits, microprocessors, to online databases and cloud computing (Bell 2007). But these massive databases need massive storage centers and equally massive means of cooling them, such as large bodies of water or dammed reservoirs.

If new structures are created or new classes capable of handling our ever-increasing data (such as blockchain technology) are invented, we return again to the issue of time and space. As noted, the time it takes for a message to go from a person’s brain to the movement of a limb is not immediate, even if it seems almost instantaneous. So, too, would be the delay between a message in Berlin and reception in Buenos Aires between two cognitively connected individuals. If a message from A takes x seconds to reach B, the reaction from B to A is x + 1. Regardless of how close the message and counter message may be, there will always be a delay.

The premise of the singularity as the convergence of human thought into a collective consciousness rests on the fact that computers are increasing our ability to receive and transmit information from anyone on the planet, through decreasing the time it takes for that information to travel. Early graphic communication such as a cave paintings or other immobile structures such as Ashoka’s pillars would take a great deal of time to reach a relatively few number of people, while increases in technology and inventions from the printing press to the internet take far less time while reaching a greater number of people. In the former, people would have to travel to the site of the depiction (or at least happen on it) whereas in the latter, information could be transported with an individual and given to another, rapidly creating, what communications theorist Marshall McLuhan called, “unified, homogeneous, reading publics” (McLuhan 2003, p. 59).

The compression of physical space as one moves from immobile to mobile mediums has also had an inverse relationship with the expansion of cyberspace and the number of individuals that can be connected in a running dialogue via the World Wide Web. As Dougherty (2013) writes, “AI functions as the hinge where the present and the future are conjoined into a single time” (p. 510). The growth in internet connectivity and the number of individuals using smartphones will only continue, particularly as innovations reduce service areas and manufacturing and operating costs, increasing the number of people capable of accessing information. Thus, that “single time” will be experienced by more and more people, all of whom will be reacting and reacting to reactions over and over again.

Taken as a whole, the timeline of history where various people, places, and ideas are connected, but only discovered through the historian’s skills in investigative hindsight, begins to seem less like a web and more like multidimensional scaffolding with countless individuals taking part in an unremitting exchange. Individually, their opinions may mean little. But as too often seen today whenever a comment runs counter to popularly held opinions and the tsunamis of online outrage and counter-rage that ensue, such rage can force change for good and ill. In this sense, Durkheim’s concept of mechanical and organic solidarity has resonance. Whereas mechanical solidarity often resorts to repressive law to ensure unity given its operation in smaller and homogeneous groups, organic solidarity depends more on restitutive law to restore equilibrium in an otherwise diverse society. The internet enables countless people to engage with one another in an organic manner but there still remains a mechanical mindset within the numerous tribes guarding their corner of the web.

When we take into account the increasing sophistication of translation applications, many with natural language abilities, the space/time continuum is further compressed. The time it takes to process and translate information from, say, China to the United States and back, would give primacy to those individuals who do not require translation and nearer the source but only slightly. This may seem like a nonissue to some for whom near instant communication is, for functional purposes, the same as instant. But the greater our sophistication in measuring time, the greater our ability to manage and control that which we are timing. It is highly unlikely that a man will ever break the 9-second mark in the 100-meter dash, at least unaided. But the current record of 9.58 seconds may eventually be measured at 9.589 or 9.5899 seconds with greater photographic sophistication. The transfer of information is similar, and an individual’s reaction time could potentially decrease with the increasing speed at which that transfer occurs, pared down and measured in the tenths and hundredths of a second. Those that are able to exploit that lag could ultimately have a greater influence over message control and manipulation.

5. Distributed Knowledge and Spatial Compression

The issue of control raises concomitant issues of censorship regardless of how singular our collective consciousness becomes. But open source sites such as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia (the fifth most visited website at the time of this writing) show that message control is the purview of official and unofficial actors. Wikipedia allows its content to be freely used and manipulated, which raises serious questions regarding legitimacy. Despite this potential for abuse, its community of volunteer writers (“Wikipedians”) correct “vandalism” (errors purposely inserted) relatively quickly and have demonstrated an accuracy comparable to professional online encyclopedias. Even so, the quality of writing is at times questionable and bias toward certain subjects over others reflects the demographics of its contributors (generally English-speaking, internet-savvy males; Rosenzweig, 2006).

Wikipedians’ demographics present another wrinkle in the singularity thesis laid out here: If a collective consciousness is being achieved through the decrease in time in message creation and reception, that consciousness will reflect the collection of connected individuals. Does this boil down to a numbers game with the largest number of people having a disproportionate effect on the quality and type of information presented? Perhaps it is still too soon to tell. But while state-sponsored censorship may always loom as a threat, less obvious and more prevalent censorship via personal beliefs and interests (or disinterests) will likely be harder to spot and even more difficult to control. Even in China, where the internet continues to be heralded as an engine for greater democratization, analysis of internet usage has shown that it is similar to that found in the rest of the world: lowbrow infotainment, misinformation, and cyber-ghettos where rigid systems of control by administrators, moderators, and users prevent challenges to community norms (Leibold, 2011).

What Wikipedia demonstrates, though, is that knowledge is not concentrated in any one person but distributed among many. The economist Friedrich Hayek pointed out decades ago the issue of distributed knowledge with regard to economic activity. “The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order,” according to Hayek (1945),

is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. (p. 519).

Everyone has bits and pieces of individual knowledge that work together (such as when prices change) and force people to adapt to changing circumstances. The result is that an economy looks as though it is being controlled by a central organizing power when it is really controlled by countless people acting according to their own discreet sets of knowledge.

If Wikipedia is on one end of the spectrum of a collective consciousness continually amassing knowledge distributed throughout a society, social media sites such as Twitter that allow users to transmit whatever pops into their heads are on the other. However, Twitter, like other social media sites, is tempered by the time it takes to punch out a message and the interval between what one thinks and what one is willing to share. Individuals have undoubtedly hesitated for a millisecond about what they just wrote, changed “all” or “every” to “many,” or simply deleted what they a moment ago were willing to blare out into cyberspace.

Whether controversial or mundane, “tweets” elicit immediate reaction, usually in the form of similarly poorly constructed rebuttals. But although immediate, they are not instantaneous. What usually follows is an ongoing push and shove from anyone privy to the said tweet. The more well-known the individual and the more boat-rocking the message, the greater the response. If a tweet is particularly upsetting, the all too common backing down and apology from the person making the tweet in question almost always ensues.

This ability to force people to change positions, however, demonstrates how social media can be weaponized and divide individuals into groups more rapidly and larger than ever given the breadth of humanity they can reach. There have been countless instances of “online mobs” targeting individuals for their actions—some patently offensive, others innocuous—shaming people for any alleged breach of social norms. Online shaming can turn into public boycotts followed by death and rape threats (Molloy, 2018), while public “doxing” of individuals (releasing private information such as their place of work and residence) has become commonplace. Online users employed by governments and religious groups alike have their own dedicated “armies” whose sole purpose is to disseminate false information through fake Twitter accounts to stir up political, religious, and racial hatred (Jacobs, 2014; Lamb, 2018).

Twitter, thus, may represent the dystopian reality of what a collective consciousness may look like: an interconnected community of theoretically every person with an internet connection relaying, consuming, and responding to an endless stream of thoughts of all stripes regardless of their veracity. In 1966, Marshall McLuhan famously foresaw these events in what he dubbed the “global village”: “The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as the little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose into everybody else’s business. The global village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony; you have extreme concern with everybody else’s business and much involvement in everybody else’s life” (M. McLuhan, 1966). Writers such as Orwell similarly saw the collective power of interconnectivity as essentially authoritarian as depicted in his novel 1984. However, others have viewed a collective “Webmind” as humanizing, preserving the integrity of human consciousness (Dougherty, 2013), or something akin to a global nervous system driving our collective intelligence (Bria & Primosig, 2015). Cochrane (2000) goes further, envisioning such a world as an expansion of man’s cognitive potential to a point where even that which we do not know will be made known to us (p. 36).

But Cochrane’s vision could just as easily be used to describe the indoctrination of individuals with the propaganda of the state, or worse, a techno-corporate state and its board members’ desires for social conformity. Ashoka followed two paths. One was bloody, destructive, and successful but only because no one was left in his wake to question his methods. The other was peaceful, expansive but eventually ineffectual (at least in India) given Buddhism’s eventual decline in the subcontinent. Human history is replete with examples of the first path. It would be short-sighted to assume that this path would be abandoned in the future in the name of technological progress, particularly given the historical use of technology to extend that path throughout the world by every society that has ever existed.

With that said, humans are unique among other animals given our ability to move beyond mere phenotypical similarities and congeal around abstract concepts such as religion, nationality, or more specific issues such as gay marriage or universal health care. But the ability to step past simplistic physical reasons (“Do they look like me?”) to more complex cognitive reasons (“Do they think like me?”) is a double-edged sword. Humans are free to choose who they associate with, but those reasons for association can potentially be even more powerful than physical differences in terms of justifying the vilification of others for their real or imagined moral failings. A person is not to be trusted simply because they look differently; they are not to be trusted because what they believe is perceived to be harmful, and those beliefs can have much broader implications on a greater range of domains. Given the breadth of reach and the lessening of time with which a messenger can promulgate his message, his destruction—figuratively or essentially—may not be so much desired as demanded.

Alongside the compression of time, though, is spatial compression, more specifically, the compression of space between medium and the human brain. Google Glass, a brand of wearable computer glasses made by Google, is an example of the movement from cave wall to stone tablet, paper, and computer screen, to the eventual display immediately in front of one’s eyes. The physical proximity between messenger and medium decreased as portability and reach expanded exponentially. Cave walls are, of course, fixed while stone tablets can move only as far as individuals are willing to carry them. Paper is truly global so long as the physical product is not lost in transit or succumbs to the elements or human carelessness. The internet, meanwhile, allows for the transfer of information anywhere. Within the span of decades, computers moved from occupying whole rooms in office and university buildings to wearable devices that continuously collect information about the world around us. This information is not merely for our consumption but can be accessed by anyone around the world privy to the database in which that data are stored. Their perception of the here and now becomes technologically embedded in a device that allows them to experience the world through the eyes of another, something Liberati (2017) calls a “collective organ” (p. 4).

As noted, smartphones represent the reductionist trajectory of technology, combining multiple applications and technologies into one. This reduction will likely continue with the decrease in physical size and space between user and interface. But Google Glass also demonstrated a limit that individuals are willing to accept when it comes to being recorded and having their image uploaded online whenever they are out in public. Wearers of Google Glass earned the unfortunate nickname “glassholes,” while some even had the device—which retailed for around $1,500 USD on its initial release—ripped from their faces and smashed in front of them. Google eventually released etiquette guidelines advising users, among other things, not to be “creepy or rude” while using them (Feldman, 2014).

As the physical space between messenger and medium decreased with each new invention, the amount of data conveyed increased. Looking at the pictures A, B, C, and D (see Figure 3), we can see how the artist’s limited number of images on a canvas (A) gave way to hundreds of words printed on single page of a book (B). This gave way to more compact data on a handheld smartphone (C) with an unlimited amount of material to scroll through, to Google Glass (D) with information conveyed immediately in front of one’s eyes.

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Figure 3.

Compression of physical space by innovation: A) painting (such as cave paintings), B) books, C) smartphones and D) smartglasses.

We can estimate that the average distance between medium and a person’s eyes (see Figure 4) is around 45.5, 35.5, 23, and 2.5 centimeters, respectively (18, 14, 9, and 1 inch). ³ Contact lenses with all the abilities of smart technology are the next step and will close that gap to zero. Smart contact lenses were patented by Samsung in 2016, and Google is working on a similar product. Neurostimulators known as deep brain stimulation systems (DBS), on the other hand, have been used since 1997 for diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease; as of 2018, more than 150,000 patients around the world have received DBS implants (Green, 2018). Neural implants as envisioned by Kurzweil whereby an individual’s thoughts can be recorded and transmitted at a near instantaneous rate into cyberspace would be negative or −x.

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Figure 4.

Compression of physical space by year and distance.

In 2017, Elon Musk announced that his new neurotechnology venture, Neuralink, registered as a medical research company in California, is working on a “neural lace” that would create a cortical interface, layering artificial intelligence inside a brain that could upload or download thoughts. Musk was quoted as saying,

Your output level is so low, particularly on a phone, your two thumbs just tapping away . . . Our input is much better because we have a high bandwidth visual interface into the brain. Our eyes take in a lot of data. (Winkler, 2017)

While the amount of information that could be processed with neural implants would be vastly expanded compared with current technology, merely having access to the internet does not equate to a person being more intelligent any more than access to a library equates to a person being well-read. But as we can see, the moment we relieved ourselves of the limitations of our hands in expressing ourselves with illustrations or writing, the amount of information we could convey and consume skyrocketed. What we can scan on our smartphones or smart optical devices via our eyes is still limited by visual acuity and distracting background stimuli.

But the sheer amount of information we garner today raises questions of how we process it. When we consider the mental effort required when we look at a work of art or read a challenging text compared with the information we consume from smartphones, there is a considerable difference in terms of energy output and time spent in deep contemplation. When we get to the level of Google Glass and the forthcoming smart contact lenses, the information we take in is (generally) photos and videos of the world around us. In other words, there seems to be less time spent contemplating and more time curating what we see in an ever-expanding online database of static and dynamic pictures. To put it simply, there is ample reason to question whether cutting-edge technology is making us smarter, or merely allowing us to populate our waking hours with pleasing ideas and images that conform to our preconceived notions of reality.

6. Conclusion

Humans have arguably experienced countless singularities that forever divided before and after. The wheel, control of fire, agriculture, the longbow—all of these changed the way in which humans moved, lived, ate, and fought. These shifts reordered social relationships across the landscape, allowing certain regions to gain advantages over others through harnessing the power of technology to political will (Goodman & Khanna, 2013). The telecommunications satellite, though, was the point where humans collectively could experience an event almost simultaneously. Mobile phones, the internet, and the array of social media that occupy the minds and time of people since then have not been different in kind so much as in degree. We should expect that future breakthroughs in AI will only increase our ability to share information more quickly and efficiently, compressing time and space within an expanding network of connected individuals.

Moving from our earliest examples of graphic representations on cave walls to the development of the internet, our ability to influence others over time and space, thus, shaping our present condition and events in the future, have been a hallmark of our species. Berardi provides a fictional, yet, highly probable scenario for how such future breakthroughs might play out in daily interactions:

When I will meet Mr. John Doe I will not need to interact with him to decide if I like this person or not. I will simply have to activate the device to recognise him in order to access the universal library of information that has been accumulated and organised by Google on this person. In my opinion this process is irresistible. (Berardi & Lazzarato, 2015, p. 20)

But Beradi’s vision demonstrates that whether or not machines gain human-like consciousness in the future may be ancillary to the real specter of AI and a collective consciousness: the loss of individuality, freedom of thought, and perhaps even the sense of discovery through the inescapable, even forced, connection between individuals in advanced, technology-dependent societies.

The more optimistic among us see such aggregations of “information citizens” as a new opportunity for individuals as “co-owners of an information culture, economy, and ecology, who have, as our shared birth right, access to every culture and every system” (Ritchie, 2015, p. 494). And yet, our increasing interconnectedness carries with it the disparate cyber-ghettos, niche enclaves, and firewalled-off communities in deep, dark corners of the web. One man’s “shared birth right” can just as easily be another’s “No Trespassing” sign. The future, therefore, could just as well be convoluted with different strains merging, breaking apart, erupting and so on; more akin to parallel threads becoming mangled in a Gordian-esque knot.

But a more fundamental question that is seldom asked or perhaps considered is whether or not we could stop the process outlined here. That is, could we as a species stop our inherent need to tinker and say, “This path we are headed down is potentially dangerous and could lead to technologies infinitely more intelligent and powerful than ourselves?” Sadly, I think the answer is “No.” Humans create tools—that is what we do, and it is the hallmark of our species. Whether AI ultimately leads to cognizant machines or a human-machine hybrid future remains to be seen. But what is much clearer is the impact of technology on the formation of a collective consciousness, and the social ramifications of massive amounts of data transferred between individuals at a constant and near instantaneous rate; a process that continuously increases in scope and speed over time.