I think modern smartphones and social media already fullfil a similar role: they store information and modify behaviour.

Behavior modification is not the goal or role I'm promoting. Law enforcement exists independent of smart phones and social media. I'm not someone who thinks that law enforcement should evolve into being a chip in our head, or that the government should police every aspect of our behavior.

I think it is an overlooked fact that people are not true individuals: you always function withn a group. The group your are in determines and changes behaviour. I think the "exocortex" will replace this, not add anything.

This is obvious. We have a global economy. In order to survive in a global economy requires most of us earn and spend money. We also live in a reputation economy (which I blog plenty about) and I make the case that public sentiment is the constraint on behavior. So of course there are behavior constraints in the form of economic constrains (resource constraints), legal constraints (law enforcement), and extrajudicial constraints (public sentiment).

You're missing most of my arguments for why I think an exocortex MUST exist. An exocortex MUST exist because human beings are incapable of scaling up with the complexity of the society we are in. Human beings are not designed to navigate groups with millions of members, or to manage thousands of relationships, or to comply with an every expanding list of laws (and social norms) which change on a daily basis.

Human beings are adapted to simple societies, small social networks such as family sized or tribal. The purpose behind transhumanism first is in recognizing that there are limitations to being human. The limited social intelligence, attention scarcity, and inability to scale decision making are based on biological limits. Whether you are a transhumanist or not, the society we live in is adopting surveillance, AI, drones, social media, etc.

So if society is becoming more complex we either scale with it as individuals or some of us will not survive. You can put all your trust in centralized top down media solutions but those groups will not care if you're a statistic, or collateral damage, because they are busy protecting their own interests (the profits for their shareholders). So if you're the victim of circumstances, it's not going to be the surveillance company which bails you out of it in most cases. It's not going to be the social media company which protects you from committing a crime which you may not even know is a crime. It's not the social media company which will keep you from being fired for saying something some group somewhere perceives as insensitive, or racist, or sexist.