Intelligence Amplification over Web

Yesterday I bought a copy of Richard Dooling's "Rapture For The Geeks:When AI outsmarts IQ".This book discusses about technological singularity which is one of my topics of interest.The idea of machine intelligence surpassing that of their human creators seemed interesting to me when I first saw Terminator back in school days.The term technological singularity was not known to me then.I have not yet completed reading Mr. Dooling's book but the discussion on Intelligence Amplification in context of Web 2.0 helped me to understand the term in newer and better way.


The term Intelligence Amplification dates back to 1956 when William Ross Ashby mentioned about "amplifying intelligence" in Introduction to Cybernetics.This actually refers to enhancing or amplifying human intelligence with help of computer aided tools.For details you can refer to this wikipedia (one of my most used IA tools) article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Computer_Symbiosis.
Now let's think about the Web 2.0 or the so called read-write Web.This is not at all a technological breakthrough to me.I completely agree to the fact that Web 2.0 is basically Web 1.0 in technical terms.But it is a major breakthrough in terms of usage of the web platform.I was a reader in Web 1.0 and now I am a reader as well as writer in Web 2.0.It provides me the power to consume as well as contribute (of course if I am willing to).I am interacting with hundreds of people in the cyberspace with their virtual identities and profiles exchanging information with me.So with advent of Facebook,Orkut,WordPress,Twitter etc. collaboration in terms of information exchange has attained a new height.Above all is Google, the most highly used and effective cognitive device which is helping me to find what I am looking for.
In the last paragraph I have purposefully used the term information and not knowledge or wisdom.This is because what I am getting from Web is actually information which needs further processing to enhance my level of intelligence by assimilating it into my knowledge system.In other words, bits of preprocessed information (as it is some wise man's viewpoint) which needs further processing by me before it becomes part of my system.The question now arises is how pieces of information makes me more intelligent as there is no change in the system (my mind,brain or whatever) that is processing it.Yes it does because now collection and organization of information has become much faster and cheaper.So obviously it takes a lot of load off from the processing system which can now be engaged into tasks of higher quality.Assume I am living a hunter gatherer lifestyle.Tired after day's hunting I would have preferred to sleep after having the raw meat of the prey or at the most after burning it a bit.But if I am able to gather the food and ingredients at ease, I will think about cooking a good dish with taste and aesthetics.
That's all I wanted to discuss about IA for now.Let me get back to Mr. Dooling's book,I feel there is something more interesting ahead.