Cognitive Revolutions

This is an idea I'm still workshopping. In summary, new knowledge gets created or discovered over time, as long as people seek it. When that new knowledge is discovered, the means for communicating this new knowledge is poorly defined and crystallizes over time. The best example is language. It is one tool that really separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. As Yuval Noah Harari describes in Sapiens, the ability of humans to organize and take action based on things that are not real is not seen elsewhere. People go to war over trivial matters. The ancient Egyptians built pyramids to bury their pharaohs. Language is a cognitive tool. But we have different types of languages now. Languages to express different ideas concisely. Mathematics, musical notation, programming languages, football play calls, internet slang, etc. A new cognitive revolution is brewing - AI. There is a lot of talk about it positive and negative. The risks are real and AI is becoming more accessible. I think it is a democratizing tool. But democracies require participation. We've watched as people have used the internet to leverage themselves to abundance and influence. We've also seen people describe what it's like to be on the other end of that. AI promises to be much more and much faster. What happens when you don't partake in a cognitive revolution? I intended this as an article for my blog a few weeks ago. But I didn't think it was ready yet. I still don't. Hoping to connect the dots here over time.

muizz

humanity is still adapting to the fact that ordinary people have broadcasting capability. cultural norms around this are still being negotiated in real time. it’s actually imo more disruptive than promethean fire; you can’t use fire to burn people on the other side of the planet

x.com

The board revolt at OpenAI reminds me of my favorite idea from Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.

The idea of the imagined intersubjective order. Companies are concepts of our collective imaginations. We call them legal entities and assign liability to them. They can be a vehicle for capturing value created by humans. They receive tax assessments. They can even be sued — absolving the people in charge of direct responsibility.

Yet, a company can be dissolved and reincarnated elsewhere by having the employees simply say they resigned and have moved to a new company. And that's how we keep lawyers employed. Tricks of our own cognition.

"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."

Suhail x.com

When the first steam engines were introduced, the owners had a really hard time finding people to operate them who wouldn't get drunk in the middle of the day, fuck up, and wreck the machine.

Ben Landau-Taylor x.com

Technological change is only possible with societal (behavioral) change

To use databases, you need to be able to think about your data in a structured way. The people who could do that gained most of the leverage from using databases. The folks who made it easy for people to transition to databases (ERPs and Co) captured the rest.

AI systems are fundamentally scalable decision making engines. And data is the oil required to power it. If you want to properly leverage AI, you need to make sure you're fueling it with the best refined data.

Otherwise, you're no different than the drunk trying to reliably operate complex machinery. The only repeatable part of that is injury.

Best thing I’ve read recently. https://t.co/FOksO0RDkR

John Coogan

x.com

The medium truly is the message

Like a raging river, information courses along faster than ever before.The maelstrom will never cease. In fact, her gales will blow harder, her raindrops grow fatter with the bits and bytes that make up our digital deluge.We have too few hours to comb through too much information. Not to mention, it takes real, hard, honest work to separate the... See more

Tom White • Curation as a Cure

Thumbnail of www-x-com-ntfabiano-status-1944060841818533907-f973ceecae644a14

You're not depressed, you just need a quest. https://t.co/Grik2Wj7OS

Nicholas Fabiano, MD

x.com

And it's much easier for the mind to wander these days. Algorithmic feed, so many random opinions and forms of content/news all in your palm

Much of our seeming intelligence actually comes not from raw brainpower or a plethora of instincts, but rather from the accumulated repertoire of mental tools (e.g., integers), skills (differentiating right from left), concepts (fly wheels), and categories (basic color terms) that we inherit culturally from earlier generations.

Joseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

Writing for Innovation

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