The better we could communicate on a mass scale, the more our species began to function like a single organism, with humanity's collective knowledge tower as its brain and each individual human brain like a nerve or muscle fiber in its body … The Human Colossus began inventing things that no human could have dreamed of inventing on their own — things that would have seemed like absurd science fiction to people only a few generations before. If an individual's core motivation is to pass its genes on, which keeps the species going, the forces of macroeconomics make the Human Colossus's core motivation to create value, which means it tends to want to invent newer and better technology. Every time it does that, it becomes an even better inventor, which means it can invent new stuff faster.
— Tim Urban