I finished reading recently the first two books in an excellent trilogy by Ramez Naam, though I haven’t been able to get my hands on the third one, as of yet, which was published last spring. (These are books I looked up after reading Cory Doctorow’s review on BoingBoing, incidentally…) The books are titled Nexus, Crux and Apex, and they deal with a young programmer and inventor, who, with his team, managed to program nanites to create a network within a person’s brain, and once there, the nanites are able to communicate by radio frequency with other nanite networks in other people’s brains. He invents a way for humans to do telepathy, in other words.

The science – and the context – is a little more complicated than that, but Naam does a good job of keeping the science correct and plausible, without falling into the trap of excessive explanations. He also does a good job of predicting and story-ifying the reaction to this invention, both the good uses and the abusive ones that people come up with, and the strong negative governmental push-back against post-humans.

As a biology nerd, though, the thing I find most fascinating is how this is the logical next step in human evolution. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the step of single-celled organisms aggregating into a multi-cellular one was one of the most profound things to ever happen. This didn’t happen over night, of course, and in practice took many, many tiny steps to fully occur, but without this, specialization of cells isn’t possible, including the development of spines and brains.

Complexity, in whatever context you’re talking about, can be defined as increasing specialization combined with increasing integration. For both organisms and societies to become more complex, to become capable of more complex ideas, more complex technologies, both specialization and integration are necessary. The step from unicellular to multicellular allowed several orders of magnitude more specialization, which, combined with integration in the form of electrical and chemical communication between the cells, resulted in organisms with spines and brains, including humans.

But now, after hundreds of millions of years of evolution from the first multicellular being, humans have likely gotten about as complex as is possible for a multicellular organism. Our brains are about as large as we can afford to have them, both metabolically, and in terms of causing birth complications.

So what’s the next step? Multi-being organisms. Humans networked together into a single organism. Not necessarily becoming a physically integrated being, but a mentally integrated one, definitely. The internet is the first slow, clumsy staggering towards this, but what if, as Naam described, we could be linked telepathically to become an organism made up of many beings, like beings are made up of many cells? Computer scientists figured out some time ago that computers worked far better with many small processing units linked together, rather than one big unit. What might a group of networked humans, thinking as a single being be capable of?

It boggles the mind.

There would, of course, be push back, as Naam predicts. (which makes one wonder, were there cells who were violently opposed to becoming part of a multicellular organism? I think I have too active an imagination, as I visualize bacteria marching with signs protesting the post-bacteria.) This would be far from a simple or easy process, and as he also predicts, there would be people who would use the connections for manipulation and abuse, rather than the benefit of the people involved.

But just like the internet can no longer be contained or controlled, despite the valiant attempts of multiple governments and organizations to do so, this change, once it is started, will only be able to be slowed, not stopped. I don’t know about you, but I’m really curious to see when and how it happens.