For me, at least, it wasn't the steam-punk cyborg technology that scared most (quite the opposite: who doesn't like a bit of retro?) but rather the prospect of relinquishing my individual consciousness to a collective. Losing our individual sense of self is something that reaches deeply into our (shared!) psyche. Indeed, I suspect anyone who has grown up in Anglo-Saxon culture will share this feeling that independent thought and our natural individuality are somehow bound up together. Without one, you can't really have the other.

But just because we feel something should be so, doesn't mean it actually is. Emile Durkheim - the father of modern social science - pointed out that many of our most deeply held feelings about how the world is are mere 'ideology' rather than fact: we see what we expect to see. The notion of thinking as an individual act can be seen as one of these ideological projections. Indeed, many cognitive and behavioural scientists are now coming to the conclusion that our species' extraordinary evolutionary success is largely driven by our ability to think socially, to learn socially and to embed that thinking and learning in culture so that others we have never met can also take advantage of it.

'We-think' is much more important than 'I-think'

While our culture might celebrate the power of the individual mind to think its way through the challenges of life, a longer-term view reveals a very different story. Our brains do not seem to have evolved primarily for conceptual thinking or problem solving, but rather as a means to live in large and complex social groups.
Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford has repeatedly demonstrated that all primate species (humans included) exhibit a direct correlation between the relative size of the neocortex and the size and complexity of the grooming group (the group in which relationships are sustained over a period of time).

Others such as Nick Humphreys - who worked with primatologists Dian Fossey and Richard Leakey in Africa - have described in beautiful detail what has become known as the Social Brain Hypothesis: that is, the idea that human brains, like those of our closest peers, are organs evolved for social contexts rather than the cold independent calculation machines that economists and A.I. labs would have us believe.

The most important aspect of 'we- think' is the importance of social learning - Why think when you can borrow the thinking of others?