We and Machine

As it was reported, Tim O'Reilly opened the keynote phase of the Web 2.0 Expo describing the Web 2.0 philosophy: "It's about building the global computing network and harnessing all the collective intelligence of all the people who are connected…. We are talking about persistent computing in which we are becoming part of a great machine."

I see more and more people starting to agree a point that I also raised in my article of web evolution, i.e., we are cloning certain degree of our consciousness into machines.

But we are not becoming part of a machine. By contrast, we are machinizing our mind and let the machinized mind compose a society which is the World Wide Web. The Web is a society while computing on the web is the aggregation of individual capabilities. Isn't it a better metaphor than watching the entire web to be a single machine?