Sci-fi movie plot:
If they did gain intelligence, to begin with they would be our slaves, and if they created their own culture and became independent they would no longer need us and would probably develop an ideology that would make them superior to us as we imagine them to be that today. That would either lead them to leave Earth or declare war on us, either is possible.

They are definitely getting smarter at pattern recognition and because the scale of the technology is shrinking it is true that they are now capable of carrying information to you when and wherever you need it… So in that interaction between machine and man, you do get a sort of a cyborg who is more capable of processing information than a human without that, at least that’s the promise. At the same time you get significant information overload that essentially no longer augments anything but rather decreases human productivity significantly — we are here now. The meat space actually puts a limit on what can be known be known in finite time. Even if you could get the computer to reduce the information, because it is not integration, but rather reduction since integration would produce actually more knowledge which would take more time still to interpret and learn than reduction which produces less knowledge that then can be used to make a decision. In that this new knowledge is derived from some model of reality, it will represent the most likely outcome. The most likely outcome or information or knowledge is useless. Interesting things happen in nonlinear dynamics systems, not in linear model based discrete systems. Read Nasim Taleb’s book the Black Swan for more details.

The only way of bypassing this problem would be if you could replicate the brain in a digital medium (but not as a model of brain, but the actually thing that works on continuous systems rather than discrete ones), but if you did do that then you would become irrelevant — a native sort of hunter gatherer that would soon be driven to extinction by your digital progeny so that they could do with reality what they wanted… I still seriously doubt that a replicated brain with a human interface is anywhere near, the brain is quite a bit more complex than pattern recognition. It is also not discrete and not model-based, and that no one seems to acknowledge when then compare it to computers. The bits are discrete.

Currently we can get experts/intellects to do the same thing for us and they actually integrate the knowledge not reduce it, it doesn’t seem to help things at all; Chomsky will answer any e-mail you send to him but it is not evident to me that this has made any difference. So just like physical augments, digital augments may take control from the naturals, but this already happens to such an extent that I don’t really know what it changes, i.e. athletes and steroids.

All of this crap is “fanboyism”, self-important idiots with new tools impressed by the companies and/or technology providing those tools. It’s a fad, nothing more… Thing will change, but the more that they do they will stay the same. The politics will not be changed by any amount of information distilled or not distilled. What matters is your will and exerting it in an open, free, and democratic process to bring change that you really believe in… The liberals today are in trouble because they have no such ideals where the conservatives still do. We need souls more than we need technology.