It’s very common these days to talk about how smart our infrastructure, institutions, tools and toys are becoming.  We have smart grids and smart energy, smart government and smart bombs, smart cars and smart phones.  While many of these are definitely more intelligent and capable than the incarnations that preceded them, by so many other measures, we find them wanting.

The reality is when it comes to measures of how intelligent something is, be it a house or a robot or an chimpanzee, at some level we’re always gauging it in terms of human intelligence.  For millennia, we humans have held ourselves as the epitome, the apex, the gold standard of what it means to be truly intelligent.  But not for very much longer.

Technological intelligences, our mechanistic and digital progeny, are going to surpass us very soon.  Not just by any single measure of performance, but by all of them.  These children of our minds will be able to out-run us, out-maneuver us and, most importantly, out-think us.  And not by just a little bit.  They will be clever and willful in ways we won’t even comprehend.  Not only because they’ll be so much smarter that we are, but because the nature of that intelligence will be so foreign. The domain of potential technological intelligences is enormous, such that it will eventually dwarf the number of different types of animal intelligences.

But along the way, we’re going to use many of these same advancing technologies to change and improve our own bodies and minds.  To raise the bar, as it were.  Intelligence amplification (or IA) will not only be an option, it will eventually become essential if we are to survive as individuals and as a species.  As many other futurists have already observed, this may well be our best hope for maintaining a degree of control over, or at least a kind of parity with, our technological offspring.

The key to all of this is recognizing and acting on these technological and evolutionary trends while there is still time to influence the direction they’ll take.  Put another way, the foresight we bring to bear on these questions now will significantly impact our place in the intelligent future
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