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

They evolved into a variety of hominid species, all of whom have since been discontinued, except one—a saucy one called homo sapiens. For them, the advancements in intelligence proved to be a major survival asset, so their cognitive capacity rapidly increased, developing into an array of shiny new tools that no animal had ever possessed before.... See more

Tim Urban • Page Not Found — Wait But Why

Zero Knowledge Proof

Arthur Hayes open.substack.com

Memecoins as a measure of attention (+ popularity)

The biggest problem in shipping is plain English

Hrishi Olickel olickel.com

Amazing things happened when geolocation was democratized. What does the future hold when that happens with intelligence?

Excerpt: “When truly transformative technology becomes accessible, it's hard to imagine how things will change - only that they absolutely will. The release of GPS to consumers was a similar moment - it would have been hard to predict Uber, Doordash and the creation of the gig economy from that final piece being unlocked: accurate location finding and routing anywhere in the world.“

Prehistoric Humans Had ADHD, Too, But the Trait Hasn't Adapted to Modern Life

Gabe Allen discovermagazine.com

Neurodivergence is a tool for improving cognition in hunting and gathering?

ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners

futurism.com

You cannot outsource your thinking to machines you don't understand

You cannot navigate an increasingly complex world without thinking about things that aren't designed for your understanding

Damned if you do… and if you don't

There is no alternative

Social Technology | Samo Burja

Samo Burja samoburja.com

Coordinating parts of society that are prone to disagreement creates room for variance elsewhere

Random thing I keep thinking about - the way (Sur)names have been decoupled from professions should be a bigger deal than they are. It's the tradeoff from writing down names but it's too much of a tradeoff.

tyro x.com

It’s about how we can naturally contextualize information that grows exponentially, how we can create tools that enable us easily organize the information we collected into meaningful structures, how we can provide a space for people to think and imagine more effectively, how we can bridge the gap between thinking and creating, how we can encourage... See more

Alan Chan • My Vision: A New City

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