Knowledge, when shared, becomes like a grand, collective, inter-generational collaboration.
Language gives a group of humans a collective intelligence far greater than individual human intelligence and allows each human to benefit from the collective intelligence as if he came up with it all himself.
If language let humans send a thought from one brain to another, writing let them stick a thought onto a physical object, like a stone, where it could live forever.
The better we could communicate on a mass scale, the more our species began to function like a single organism, with humanity’s collective knowledge tower as its brain and each individual human brain like a nerve or a muscle fiber in its body. With the era of mass communication upon us, the collective human organism—the Human Colossus—rose into existence.
Computers have been a game-changer, allowing humanity to outsource many of its brain-related tasks and better function as a single organism.
This ridiculous-looking thing is the most complex known object in the universe—three pounds of what neuroengineer Tim Hanson calls “one of the most information-dense, structured, and self-structuring matter known.”