| Which leads to an unsettling thought: > And culture builds on culture. (...) That cumulative process is what allows for the civilization that we now live in, but it raises a very interesting paradox and it’s interesting that it’s very rarely commented upon. > Here’s the thought experiment: (...) imagine I showed you an Apple II running World of Warcraft. If you knew anything about computers you’d say, “Impossible. Impossible!” (...) > Now, let’s think about human beings. Human beings are hardware that’s about 100,000 years old, but we run string theory, Lie algebra. We’re running 21st-century software! (...) > I happen to be one who believes that the cultural becomes so complicated at a certain point that it won’t run on our brains. And in fact, you could argue that the reason why we’ve generated computational devices is consciously or unconsciously, we’ve come to recognize that our endogenous, organic computing power is not up to the task and we have to recruit machines to represent culture, because we cannot. I think there’s good evidence for that. > I think that that ultimately might be what bounds us; that we’ll reach a point where our memory capacity and inferential power simply cannot accommodate the latest cultural artifact. At that point what happens? Does it become independent of us, or does it just stop? It’s like evolution coming to an end. --- The whole thing is worth watching really, but that question really hit home for me. Though maybe I'm more optimistic: if we automated away all of the menial -- such as deciding what's for dinner, searching for the next book to read, etc. (unless it's done for pleasure of course) -- and the political -- automate a large portion of how our institutions are run -- all of these things that stifle and fragment our creative energies, so that we could focus all of our brainpower and energy on creative endeavours, how much more could we accomplish? There's still a cognitive limit, but it seems to me that currently we are mired by so much unnecessary overhead that once we are able to remove it, we'll find that limit is a lot farther away than we expected. I'd guess that for most of us, well over 50% of our creative energy is instead spent on the unnecessary and menial. Especially since brains are not Turing machines, and the cost of overhead is not linear (50% overhead might mean more than 50% productivity loss): brains get tired over time, they burn out, they need rest, context switching is hard... that overhead burns you out and is making you less productive even when you're not actively thinking about it (what's for dinner, your personal finances, schedules, meetings, that dentist appointment, am I due for a haricut? did I already book the mechanic? my car is making that weird noise again, oh crap did I miss the new Game of Thrones last night, now I gotta catch up... etc etc etc etc) -- what a relief would it be to automate all of that and only focus on what's fun and what's important!) |
It isn't perfect, but I guess there are lots of ways in which it succeeds at it.