Cognitive Revolutions
How to Invent Everything | Ryan North
youtu.beThis talk explores technological innovation and and the first periods in history when they were possible to discover.
Language persists information within communities. Writing persists information across generations.
Spoken language distinguished our common anatomical (200 Kya) from our behaviorally (52 Kya) human ancestors.
Writing requires only basic tool use — etching on a solid medium.
First evidence of writing is from 5.2 Kya.
Imagine all of the information that was lost to time, as well as innovations that were delayed.
In response to a tweet saying: out brains forget things for a reason
2nd brain is an attempt to evolve past that. Should we?
An AI assistant shouldn't have these constraints, but even those are optimized for memory.
The Beginning of Infinity
thebeginningofinfinity.xyzAlan Chan • My Vision: A New City
Attention spans and deficits
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different
... See moreTed Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
This actually wouldn't surprise me
The DuPont Company's Chart Room
hagley.org
It is easy to take for granted the abundance of organized information we now have access to on demand.
DuPont created this room in 1919 and didn't share details about how they used it in public until 1950.
