Cascio's basic premise is this:

Here's an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don't have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.

Most people don't realize that this process is already under way. In fact, it's happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It's visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity . . . And advances over the next few decades, driven by breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, will make today's technologies seem primitive . . .

Scientists refer to the 12,000 years or so since the last ice age as the Holocene epoch. It encompasses the rise of human civilization and our co-evolution with tools and technologies that allow us to grapple with our physical environment. But if intelligence augmentation has the kind of impact I expect, we may soon have to start thinking of ourselves as living in an entirely new era. The focus of our technological evolution would be less on how we manage and adapt to our physical world, and more on how we manage and adapt to the immense amount of knowledge we've created. We can call it the Nöocene epoch, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the Nöosphere, a collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human minds.

You can read the whole article in The Atlantic.

After explaining her own geek cred ("I love me some Doctor Who, some Firefly, just caught up on BSG, own two copies of the Oxford Book of Science Fiction Short Stories, have four first edition Sandmans, and really haven't emotionally come to grips with the fact that I am never going to have superpowers"), McArdle offers up tips on how to get Jane Doe to come around to geek culture:

Those of you who pitch science fiction to wives and girlfriends who do not enjoy it are probably saying something along the following lines: "Space ships! Alien monsters! Men in tights!" Instead, for women who find that sort of thing distasteful, talk about it as a fairy tale—only a fairy tale with science instead of magic. The basic emotional space it taps is the same.

That's right - Women like fairy tales, not science fiction. So make it sound like a story with princesses in it. Don't worry, she also hits the old familiar note, as well:

You might also try to ease her into something with a little more human emotion and a little less space opera.

I can't work out - is this some kind of self-loathing gender warfare thing, or just randomly patronizing? Maybe she only knows some crazy fairy-tale-obsessed fangirls and doesn't get out much? Don't get me wrong, I'm not going as far as some people and suggesting that Megan should be fired or anything, but still. Perhaps you should stick to the economics for awhile, Megan.

Explaining Science Fiction To Women [The Atlantic]

Carr's argument is a subtle one so I suggest reading the whole feature. But let me take a shot at a one-sentence distillation: The internet is giving us a form of ADHD when it comes to reading, and we should be scared of that.*

I don't entirely disagree with the first part of that thought, but the second doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In Carr's own words, humans have been developing technologies that change the way we thnk throughout our history:

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

Now I hate alarm clocks as much as the next guy, and it's true, we do live our lives by minutes and hours more than the cycles of the sun, moon, tides, or whatever. But is Carr really trying to say that the advent of the 9-5 job cancels out the advances of all of science, math, and our understanding of the universe? That's pushing it.

And so is this passage on how Google will one day turn into the HAL-9000:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

...their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Google's dominance of the digital world is admittedly a little unnerving, but HAL? C'mon now. Actually Carr's article leads and ends with references to the murderous and fictional computer, making it pretty clear what he thinks about the role artificial intelligence will play in our non-fiction future.

In the end Carr's article isn't entirely ham-handed — but his analysis is. He looks back on Socrates, who once wrote about how the invention of writing would be the death of us all. Later, other writers thought the printing press would ruin the pursuit of knowledge. Looking back, those sentiments seem shortsighted, and with good reason. They're actually evidence against Carr's case: If printing presses are any indication of how these things go, the internet will facilitate an intellectual revolution the likes of which no one could predict in the early going.

But Carr still argues that the internet is going to ruin the human mind. Who knows, maybe he just couldn't resist the opportunity to compare himself to Socrates. Regardless, both Carr and the ancient Greek were wrong on this one: their arguments are little more than over-intellectualized bellyaching that resemble old people's classic "kids these days" speech. But instead of moaning about modern youth, the refrain is more like "technology these days."

*I realize the paradox here — if Carr's right, no one's going to go read the whole feature. You probably won't even read this whole post. You'll scan the headline, maybe a paragraph or two, then go flitting off to the next item. I've got more faith in io9ers, though.