Ray Kurzweil famously says that "we evolved for a world that was linear and local, but now live in a world that is global and exponential". Kurzweil may have not been accurate in all of his ideas, a lot points to that neurons are not transistors (1s and 0s), but instead contain microtubules that act as "resonance computers", processing massive amounts of information per neuron^{[1, 2]}, but he has done incredible work to popularise and teach exponential trends with the notion of the law of accelerating returns.^[3]

Another counter-intuitive trend could be that of offloading trust from the human brain, with "extra-cerebral trust" such as blockchains, and post-blockchain systems like BitLattice. The idea that trust could be offloaded from the brain could be counter-intuitive for the exact reason that it stands in contrast to innate trust systems, which are how the brain does memetic cognition and reasoning overall.

Offloading trust and the trend of technological extensions

If you look at the general trend of offloading functions onto technology, then that trust would be "externalized" makes a lot of sense. The use of fire and cooking extended our gastrointestinal system and our jaws, the use of stone tools our hands, wheels were extensions of our legs, and books and computers prostheses of the human brain.

Cryptography, as a language, is then an extension of the executive (ego) system, which coordinates attention and regulates what memes to absorb, in feedback with the memetic cortex.

Turning our frontal lobes inside out

The evolution of language is a process of externalizing the mind, extending the space that it can travel across, with more and more reference points, and now that trust can be extended with cryptography, the human mind will be able to navigate that new domain, and society as a whole continue to grow its intelligence, moving towards what Mark Pesce called Homo nexus, the connected humans. ^[4]

References

1. Stuart Hameroff lectures on quantum consciousness - UC Berkeley

2. Discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons corroborates controversial 20-year-old theory of consciousness - KurzweilAI.net

3. Ray Kurzweil: The accelerating power of technology | TED Talk

4. The Next Billion Seconds - nextbillionseconds.com