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Tuesday, December 23, 2008 12:00 AM

Is the Web helping us evolve?

The truth lies somewhere between "Google is making us stupid" and "the Internet will liberate humanity."

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  • Monday, December 22, 2008 08:20 PM

    Magical Thinking

    Well, the thing about the Singularity boys is how much they have in common with South Seas Cargo Cults. If you build it, It will come, It being variously interpreted, although there seems to be a consensus that all the former things will pass away; whether or not this is a Good Thing being dependent on how you feel about the quality of your own life I suppose. Eschatology is like that: what you bring to the theatre is more important than what you find there.

    But the core thing of it is pretty simply sympathetic magic: we may not understand this thing, but if we add a whole lot more of it, things will surely change. What ties it all together is how much we either exult in or dread change itself. Everybody dreads the thought that no, actually, things will, in most important areas, pretty much go on as before.

    Because in the mean time, as we kick all this around, most of us will get on with the business of life: making babies, making and eating food, crying into our pillows, and so on; pretty much the same as it always was. Dreadful and unmagical quotidian reality, with paradigms unshifted.

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