A complete history of humans and technology Updated 17 November 1995 ============================================================= I started typing a reply to the extropian list thread on "too many choices", and came up with the following notes on evolution of humans and technology that are actually getting close to what I really think is happening with humans. I hope you will like these ideas and help me develop them. -------------------------------------------------------------- Let us look at things from a systemic perspective and define our subject as an organism consisting of a core control system and a bunch of sensors and actuators on the periphery. If the organism is small and simple, its parts may be mixed together and perform the same simple functions all the time. In further growth we have more and more functional elements and an increasingly complex architecture. The development of further functions within the same structure becomes difficult; I can list the following reasons for it: - new additions become increasingly specialized and geared towards specific and rare situations. So they offer diminishing benefits, while body maintenance costs grow at least linearly. After a while, new additions to the same body are just not worth it. - in a random mutation/selection scheme, the more complex the body, the less selective influence you get from each of the features. So with time it makes sense to turn to a dynamic system configuration. The connected core body retains generic control functions which allow it to incorporate, permanently of temporarily, specialized attachments (a.k.a. tools, accessories, and instruments) - from problem-solving techniques to screwdrivers. The open control system has to be more general and structured, as it has no opportunity to grow together with the tools, but is instead used to acquire, configure and manage the toolkits and exchange them with the environment. - This is my understanding of the role of intelligence. It is still considerably simpler than the old integrated part of the organism, whose controls are pre-calibrated for use with its permanent instruments. This scheme allows for rapid evolution of exosomatic attachments (knowledge and technological artifacts). This shared toolkit soon outgrows the manipulational abilities of the personal generic intelligence, and puts it under stress - "too much choice/complexity". Though still much simpler than the old part of the organism, the intelligence hurts more because it is stretched more and, since it's the intelligence that voices its opinion, it in understandable selfishness pays more attention to its own problems. The overload problem is solved by "emigration" of organisms' functionality. First available method is to elevate some integrational features of an organism to meta-personal level. Thus, a loose collection of individuals ("population") turns into an integrated social structure, and the individual organisms are forced to turn into semi-specialized tools by integrating with particular instruments ("profession"). Still, even with a growing size of the social organism and improving ways of instrument exchange, this process is limited by the same personal abilities and population size. The second method is to delegate some generic features to the tools themselves and make sure they have a greater degree of autonomy (easy-to-use; reliable; versatile) and can, in turn, combine with each other and accept additional features. We may expect that they would do it faster and easier than humans. It is quite natural that the first information functions to migrate to the external tools are abstract and precise operations, as they are both most needed for an open intelligent system, and least efficiently implemented in biological minds - actually, symbolic manipulation abilities are just the latest and rather clumsy and slow patch on the ancient brain architecture whose main strengths are signal processing and image recognition. Then the tools start taking over these areas as well... One of the very recent phenomena is that the external tools are starting to get better in communication than the human symbolic abilities. Written language is a wonderful and information-rich form of knowledge representation. Unfortunately, the human brain processes much slower than the physical signals. One of the important reasons for proliferation of symbolic communication until recently was inefficiency of external information storage and transmission media that could not handle more than letters and digits. With the inventions of radio, telephone, movies, and GUI interfaces humans return to processing what they handle well - physical images. This doesn't mean decline of symbolic information processing - on the contrary, it is exploding and taking over analog processing. This process, however, is going on in the media that handle symbols well - and this doesn't include the brain. So the new media are bypassing the human symbolic I/O and taking it upon themselves. (This process is somewhat similar to what happened with digestion and cooking - cooking performs some of the functions of breaking up proteins so much better than the digestive system, that with some kinds of food we totally rely upon it. I would not be surprised if most humans have already lost the ability to effectively digest raw meat.) The complexity of human life will probably start dropping sometime soon together with human utility for the system. Actually, a naked human body (i.e. unsupplemented with externally developed knowledge or material tools) already has no utility - or rather, *would* not have, as I do not believe there is a single human body in that state today. A growing number of humans is finding themselves of little utility even as tool operators, no matter how hard they try; as humans are losing comparative advantages over distributed and non-biological systems, the shrinking number of them are needed - usually those with particularly strong or unique skills. What will happen to humans as the result of this process may be unclear; However, I would expect that the human share of *input* into the growing network of material artifacts and knowledge will dramatically diminish over the next generation or two, with most people falling out of the process. Actually, tragic as it sounds to me, most humans probably won't care, as they have already no sense of, and no interest in understanding, the development of the global process. (Or did they ever?)