DISCUSSION 
There is one nice little idea which was put up about a quarter 
of a century ago as pure science fiction, but which now appears 
to me to be within the bounds of the next generation of possi- 
bility. If one could circumvent these organs of speech and 
hearing neurophysiologically, by arranging some sort of 
mechanism by which we could plug in to each other intellect- 
ually—if, for instance, one could take the people in this room 
and plug us in to each other so that we could think as a unity— 
this would be the first self-accelerating invention. One would 
then not only have a multiple brain, one would be free of 
nature’s random distribution of genii. Whoever achieves 
this first is going to become the possessor of such a “super- 
genius”’ that he will make all other possible inventions there- 
after. This is one suggestion for a technological improvement 
that could vastly change the future of the human race, much 
more than space travel! 
Huxley: I would like to introduce into the discussion a 
point that I made in my original talk, namely, that evolution 
takes place by a series of steps or grades of organization, each of 
which seems to reach a limit in its subsequent evolution. 
Bronowski made a similar point, namely, that any more com- 
plex entity has to be built up out of subunits, none of which 
can go further unless combined with others. I think that 
something of this sort is happening in human life, and we are 
now approaching a limit to our present type of psychosocial 
organization. For instance, Price has made the point about the 
explosive overproduction of science, and the choking of 
scientific channels of communication. 
At this moment we are at a stage when we have to make the 
step from our present pattern of psychosocial and scientific 
organization to a new one. In this connexion I was much 
interested by what Glikson said about “seeds of the future’, 
and the necessity for producing concrete examples of what the 
future might bring, including Glikson’s example of local 
architectural environment. If our present stage is reaching its 
limit, what is going to happen in the next one? I should like 
to come back to what was hinted at by me in my introductory 
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