Carpooling and Why Humanity Will Never Reach the Singularity

Google recently launched Google Buzz, a Twitter-ish application whose purpose is a mystery to me. I'm not sure what it is supposed to do, but what it seems to be doing is making a lot of people angry over privacy issues.

For some reason this sparked a thought. I don't think we'll be able to become an evolved single consciousness. It has to do with Google Buzz, Facebook Login-gate, and carpooling.

Do you know anyone that carpools? Living in Chicago, I can move around 98% of the time without a car. Yet we have constant automobile traffic. When I worked at UIC I used to watch cars on the highway while waiting for the blue line train to show up. Rarely did I see a car that had more than one person in it. As each commuter crawled their way down the road, I wondered why they weren't taking the train or carpooling with their neighbors. I'm sure most of them work downtown.

If we can't even get two people into the same car, how can we consolidate all human intelligence?

I was recently informed via various blogs like this one that many people are too stupid to even understand how to login to Facebook. This is a sobering thought: people are actually clicking on still images of the Facebook login page and are confused as to why they can't type in the boxes. People are using Google to search for "facebook login" so that they can be taken to the front page of www.facebook.com. This is mind-boggling to me. Yet when I think about it some more, I start to see how this can come to pass.

I am lucky to be someone who has always had an eye on technology. I was a decent student in school. I have a family who is proud of education and intelligence. Some people do not have all of these things... but they do have a computer. If I was someone who had never owned or operated computer until today, the Internet might very well be an extremely confusing place. As it happens, I've been online since 1996, and have essentially seen the Web grow to what it is. No culture shock for me.

If our experiences regarding technology are class and education based, how can we ever create an even playing field where everyone can experience technology at the same level?

And then there's Google Buzz, which tried to make setup so easy that it, by default, allowed way too many people to have access to a large amount of personal content. Not only did this make people angry, but it can also be quite dangerous. The fact that before you were given the option to tell Google Buzz NOT to share your information, it was doing it was a HUGE mistake by Google. One they are already working damage control on, actually.

The crux of this issue is that individuals are not evenly willing to share the same information with the public. Not only that, but most of the time it can get you into big trouble. People have been fired, attacked, divorced, robbed, arrested, and killed because of the information they may not have known they were sharing.

If we cannot all decide what is public knowledge and how to act when presented with information, how can we form the trust required for human consciousness to be singular?

All of the "social networking" in the world won't fix the basic problems of being social: greedy people are unwilling to share, ignorant people are unsure how to share, and manipulative people take advantage of those who share.