At a fairly heroic dose of psilocybin a person lying in silent darkness has the impression that they're seeing more art, of higher quality, than the entire western canon has produced in the last thousand years...For artists it's like a magic carpet. The challenge...is to have the experience in an attitude of appreciation and calmness. But the second implication is somewhat political. It's to communicate the vision...because as we communicate it collectively it will become real. This is what's happening on the internet. The internet is a perfect example of a psychedelic technology at the service of psychedelic goals...it's something that hackers, freaks and heads dreamed up, whipped up out of the existing tools of the culture.
How artificial, how alien will the AI be? We don't know because we don't know how superintelligence thinks, if we knew we would be superintelligent. In a way we have called forth into our midst another species of intelligence.
Long before flying saucers land on the south lawn of the White House the alien artificial intelligence that is growing in the primordial soup of the internet will have speciated and conquered the planet.
You won't be able to tell where your body stops and the internet begins. In other words, you'll say, "Gee I wonder what they're serving at so and so restaurant tonight?" and the answer will be hanging there in space because you will have automatically accessed the internet, been to their website, looked at the menu and returned with the data...What the internet is, is a nervous system, it's the collective mind of humanity being hardwired as an artifact that completely encloses the entire planet in a thought.