I was introduced by means of a reference in a novel to a French scientist, theologian and philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955). I've not actually read any of the guy's stuff, as I only today got round to having a look on the Internet, but it's interesting stuff.
As a paleontologist, de Chardin has a rather dodgy past - he was either taken in by or part of the Piltdown Man conspiracy. As a theologian he was an unconventional Jesuit Priest and Roman Catholic, eventually assigned to China due to his unconventional beliefs. As a philosopher he made interesting speculations regarding social evolution, including ideas about the development of something similar to what we now call the Internet.
He believed that humankind had reached a point where they had to evolve themselves socially or die, and that this social evolution would give birth to a virtual world mind.
That is a VERY rough and ready summary, missing out the bits I don't like (like rocks being part of the world mind). I find it an interesting set of ideas to discuss.
For example, this statement;
"My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him."
... and;
"If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness."
To me this is an ace statement, perhaps more elegantly phrased by Martin Luther King as 'The slow curve of humanity is towards justice", (I might be paraphrasing slightly).
He stipulated that biological entities evolved into more complex entities and that these became aware;
"Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself."
... and;
"the power acquired by a consciousness to turn it upon itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed with its own particular consistence and value: no longer merely to know, but to know oneself; no longer merely to know but to know that one knows.
This is pivotal to his belief that an evolution conscious of itself could also direct itself AND its own evolution. He used the word noogenesis for this, Greek for 'Soul Birth'.
He saw science as an essential part of this, starting as isolated activities of individuals but now;
"Today we find the reverse: research students are numbered in the hundreds of thousands-soon to be millions-and they are no longer distributed superficially and at random over the globe, but are functionally linked together in a vast organic system that will remain in the future indispensable to the life of the community."
One could even argue he conceived the Internet;
"And here I am thinking of those astonishing electronic machines (the starting-point and hope of the young science of cybernetics), by which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is reinforced and multiplied by the process and to a degree that herald as astonishing advances in this direction as those that optical science has already produced for our power of vision."
He was not a souless intellectual, as he didn't see this as a process of just intellectual learning;
"It is not our heads or our bodies which we must bring together, but our hearts. . . . Humanity. . . is building its composite brain beneath our eyes. May it not be that tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the movement drawing it together, it will find its heart, without which the ultimate wholeness of its power of unification can never be achieved?"
... and for me another extremely good thought;
"We have reached a crossroads in human evolution where the only road which leads forward is towards a common passion. . . To continue to place our hopes in a social order achieved by external violence would simply amount to our giving up all hope of carrying the Spirit of the Earth to its limits."
I find his arguements interesting. The development of the Internet will likely be seen as a time as defining as the development of movable type. Nowadays, one can access information in seconds, minutes or hours, that would have taken hours, days and weeks before. Knowledge is there for people who want it, not reserved for elite groups.
This network also means that people can communicate socially in a way they never did before. Look at the activity in Discussion Groups on the 11th of September. Look at the activity here. And the Internet, as most of us know it, isn't even ten years old.
Through means of a technological development, we are evolving socially. Yes, it's happened before, but movable type, bicycles and telephones did not become as common as quickly as the Internet has, or involve making informational or social transactions with diverse people as readily available as the Internet does. It is what de Chardin called an Omega Point. The development of a noosphere, an overlying conscienceness of the world, comprising not just of the shakers and the movers, but you, me, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeverybody (with Internet).
Just as Information Technology is affecting our social evolution, it could be in 100 years time the at least partial stalling of the biological evolutionary process (due to Society rightly protecting the less able, and thus allowing them to have children, assuring the continuation of any genes that may have lead to them being less able) will end, as people growing up in the GM age will think nothing of having myopia excised from their children's genome, or whatever other genetic nasty that might be lying there.
The social evolution seems to be almost unavoidably beneficial. We are all, basically, very much the same. Being able to sample that in a understandable fashion will lead to a greater unity and consensus.
Further biological evolution by technological means will be very, very problematical unless it is proceeded by social evolution that would make such a thing harmless. Otherwise we have the eugenic speculation of the early part of the 20th Century becoming true a Century later, with all the nightmarish potential for harm.
Here's some sources for de Chardin;
http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/mar/cunning.html
http://www.interfaithfellowship.org/oncourse/articles/philosophers/dechard.htm
http://www.crosscurrents.org/chardin.htm
http://www.sacredcenters.com/articles/noosphere.html
http://www2.gol.com/users/coynerhm/teilhard.html
People living in glass paradigms shouldn't throw stones...