"The researchers attending the conference (mostly) discounted the idea of a spontaneous intelligence stemming from the Internet, and other highly centralized intelligences outside the web."
Intelligence is defined as: capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.
The Internet is hardly a source of intelligence and hardly centralized. Just reading through this forum, one cannot be so gullible as to make such a silly conclusion - a source of data, but hardly “intelligence”.