The universities, companies, and individuals involved in this machine learning renaissance are a collective super-intelligence.
It's amazing how fast we can learn now, fuelled by information-sharing over the internet. I'm literally forgetting the names of everyday acquaintances because I'm learning and retaining so much new stuff.
The problem, from an individual's perspective is that, while you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can't easily commandeer all that brain-power.
I'm imagining getting some time-slices of Terry Tao, Geoff Hinton, <insert other big brain names> 's cognition to devote to my own projects. What would that even look like?
On a different note, if we really could mind-meld, could we ever truly hate or kill each other?