= new reply since forum marked as read
Best thing I've read in a while. 
That one is the possibility that a peculiar consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is behind the rise of human civilization and the current triumph of capitalism.
The Second Law (which says that entropy always increases in an isolated system that is near thermal equilibrium) behaves very differently in open systems that are far from equilibrium. Such systems exhibit spontaneous increases in structure and self-organization in response to energy flows, regardless of whether people are involved. According to some fairly heavy-hitting scientists like Erwin Schrodinger, this effect is the source of life itself. Throw in human intelligence and fossil fuels, and what you get is a positive feedback effect that mandates further growth, regardless of what the individuals living inside the system might prefer.
In a way, this operation of the Second Law implies that human behavior becomes "statistically deterministic" at the collective level of a global civilization of 7 billion people. In this view, which is drawn by analogy from the field of statistical mechanics, our growth-hunger is an emergent property similar to the temperature or pressure of a container of gas. It becomes obvious only when there are enough molecules in the container to permit a statistical aggregation of their individual positions and velocities. In my view this effect is what we're seeing in the operation our 7-billion-person civilization.
When this concept of statistical determinism is coupled with the scientific work of Benjamin Libet on consciousness and free will, it makes me very doubtful whether anything like "free will" actually exists. We're good at convincing ourselves of its existence, but I see precious little evidence of it.
This thermodynamic interpretation may explain the emergence of the cybernetic super-organism I described in the OP. This organism represents the next level of self-organization and complexity beyond the purely human scale. In a sense it is an evolutionary inevitability, given the limit-removing nature of human intelligence, our accumulated engineering knowledge, and the vast energy flows permitted by our use of fossil fuels.
My comment about capitalism at the top comes from my observation that capitalism has been the most effective socioeconomic structure yet created to permit high levels of energy use and the consequent growth of structure. I don't think it's greed that did it, I think we just stumbled on an organization that was more effective for those purposes than its competitors, and so it has prevailed. No blame, no morality, just thermodynamics.
This is a much bigger discussion than we can have in a GD thread, because it completely subverts most of our common understanding of what's going on in the world and why, but this will have to do for now.
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. 
For most of us a warm, nourishing soup of emotions with some free-floating "rules of thumb" to connect it to reality will get us through the night just fine. I appear to be one of the unfortunate few who is cursed with the desire to see behind the curtain. “Yeah, I know that’s what you say is happening, but I wonder what’s really going on?”
