Immediate parallels thrown up by my own brain: Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere; Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Putting on an uncritically optimistic technophiliac hat for a moment, might we imagine the increased global socialisation enabled by modern communications networks to provoke some similar expansion of human brain capacity?
We might… but bear in mind the locust’s brain-boost is necessary to cope with a life where fierce resource competition and cannibalism is the norm. Hey presto: a grimly allegorical sf dystopia that writes itself!
…and then eats itself.
“might we imagine the increased global socialisation enabled by modern communications networks to provoke some similar expansion of human brain capacity”
THAT, Peak Oil, Water Crisis, and Global Warming. So yes, quite analogous.