The more knowledge that’s accumulated in one place, the faster it gets around the whole world. Like TV. When I started high school there were no TV sets outside of laboratories. By the time I graduated from high school you couldn’t look over any American city without seeing a sea of TV aerials. A whole revolution had occurred in just four years. Something similar has been happening with computers in this decade, and they’ve spread across the whole country with tremendous rapidity. Meanwhile, knowledge—wherever it’s discovered—is traveling over the whole world faster and faster. So the movement of knowledge and power from east to west over the last several thousand years has now become an oscillation in which the knowledge is circling the globe faster and faster very palpably and physically in the form of the satellites up there, which are circling the globe and serving as the communication network of the emerging global brain.
The general pattern is: religious stupidity exists for millennia, political stupidity exists for centuries, scientific stupidity exists only for generations before it gets cured. So there are different ratios of recovering from stupidity depending on what method you’re using. The theological method sort of guarantees that you can remain stupid indefinitely until a major calamity forces a change. The political method allows you to remain stupid for many generations until you’ve antagonized enough of the world that they come in and sack your cities. And scientific stupidity only lasts until a generation is born bright enough to start asking basic questions again and not just following what the teacher tells them.
I² means “intelligence looking at intelligence.” That’s how intelligence increases: when intelligence looks at intelligence and criticizes intelligence.
The direction of evolution seems very likely to be that life is moving to the position where it will be omnipotent: where life can do anything it wishes to do. And in general you can see that even on the surface of a primitive planet like this. From the time life started here, it has spread itself all over the planet, taking whatever form it has to take to adapt to any condition. Life has gotten to the top of the Himalayas; there are lifeforms up there. Life has gotten to Little America. Look at the sidewalk closely when you’re taking a walk and you see little bits of grass coming up between the cracks. Life has found a way to break through the concrete. Life seems to have a tremendous Dionysian exuberance about it—what Nietzsche called a will to power—and life seems to be aiming at nothing less than the attainment of divinity. We are part of the process of evolution from amoebas to cosmic immortals.
Cosmic immortals are creatures who live anywhere in the universe they damn well please, travel as fast as they want to, and never die. That’s the idea of a god. A god goes anywhere, never dies, and moves as fast as a god wants to move. That is what we are evolving toward, gradually. Most futurists do not make predictions that outrageous because futurists are trying to become respectable. Those of you who heard me in Boulder last night know that I have no desire to become respectable. I am in a much more dangerous business than that, I am trying to provoke new thoughts.