1. “When we learned to ride horses, it would have been improper to note that man has learned to gallop on all fours. What we have learned to do with Internet is as much a collaborative effort between ourselves and our machines as horse riding is a collaborative effort between ourselves and our beasts of burden.”

I like this metaphor, but I feel that a reiteration of the point I made earlier to you is in order. Ok, sure: like you said, galloping is something that horses do, not something that their human riders do. It would be literally wrong to say that the cowboys galloped across the plains–galloping isn’t something that cowboys do. By the same token, though, it would be wrong to say that the cowboys’ horses vengefully pursued the Indian war party across the plain–vengeful pursuit is not something that horses do, but rather something that people do. The same activity (moving from one side of the plain to another) can be talked about differently depending on what features of the movement we want to pick out: if we want to talk about how the horses (and cowboys) got from one side to the other, we can mention the galloping that the horses did, and talk about how it was that something the horses did allowed for the rapid movement of the cowboys. If, on the other hand, we want to talk about why the movement took place, or what the intention of the cowboys were, we have to mention “mental words” like ‘belief’ and ‘desire.’ These two descriptions are, of course, fundamentally related: the galloping of the horses mediates the pursuing that the cowboys did–a totally non-mental process that humans aren’t doing allows for the performance of the (at least somewhat) mental process of vengefully pursuing.

The same, I think, can be said about computers. The electron manipulation that the computer “does” mediates the cognitive processes that humans do–the movement of charges in my calculator mediates my attempt to solve a math problem–but the cognition is still fundamentally a human process. Computers are just galloping, and cognition consists in pointing the reins in the right direction.

2. “Such comparisons [to QM] are really unfortunate, since they relegate the complexities of technologically mediated social interactions to the realm of magic and spirituality, which is wholly antithetical to the project of understanding the nature of technology and the consequences of its changes.”

Damn right. Calling something “mystical” or “spiritual” amounts to throwing up our hands and saying “Oh well! Science will never understand!” That’s the wrong approach to take with regard to QM, technology, and, well, everything.

3. “Is it really the manifestation of our collective consciousness, finally unified after tens of thousands of years?”

This isn’t anything new. There’s been a metaphorical meta-mind out there at least since someone invented language–it’s just getting faster and bigger now. That doesn’t mean that anything metaphysical has been created, though: just that there are things going on that defy description in traditional mental vocabulary. I think that’s all Searle means when he says that collective intentionality is a primitive; there are (social) processes going on now that aren’t most usefully described with individual mental words–we need a new vocabulary to pick out the interesting features.

The time, it seems, has come. Sign me up for clinical trials.

http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/robotics/can-terminators-actually-be-our-salvation