Here’s a “glass is half-full” take on the augmented cognition meme in the context of our global challenges.
In the Atlantic, partily in response to Nicholas Carr’s now seminal article on Google making us stupid, Anastasia Vasilakis has penned a smart piece that sideswipes the brain-machine interface crowd.
Money quote:
Yet in one sense, the age of the cyborg and the super-genius has already arrived. It just involves external information and communication devices instead of implants and genetic modification. The bioethicist James Hughes of Trinity College refers to all of this as “exo cortical technology,” but you can just think of it as “stuff you already own.” Increasingly, we buttress our cognitive functions with our computing systems, no matter that the connections are mediated by simple typing and pointing. These tools enable our brains to do things that would once have been almost unimaginable
Discoverers and Discoveries 