Accumulation
How human progress compounds, and why AI changes the function.
How Human Progress Compounds, and Why AI Changes the Function
As I sat enjoying dinner on a hot summer night, I found myself noticing the ordinary objects around me: the umbrella covering the starry sky; the half-dimmed broken neon restaurant sign; and the stainless steel fork which had on it my sizzling local delicacy. These objects were not extraordinary. No one would stop to admire them. Yet I could not shake the strange sense of awe they gave me.
Although each of those objects is seemingly uninteresting on its own, looking beyond its physical form reveals an entire universe. Behind each one are inventors, producers, factory workers, designers, and countless people whose names will never be known. Their stories are hidden in plain sight, reduced to the simple metal and plastic objects around us. Objects are humanity’s ability to compress lives into matter. They turn millions of private decisions, failures, skills, and ideas into things so ordinary we barely notice them.
Cynical as it sounds, in the end you’re nothing more than the traces which you leave behind. Most of you disappears. Only the consequences of your life remain. This effective pruning of all unnecessary information about your life, inhumane and dehumanising as it is, is the biggest engine for progress in the animal kingdom. All other animals rely mostly on instinct and genetics, some even get to infer a few things about the world around them, but no animal comes close to the scale at which humans can infer and predict the world (and its quirks) around them.
With that in mind, one could imagine society at large as a function, f, whose inputs are the consequences of every human life. Every person becomes a single point of input, and billions of parameters such as the minds or the objects which surround you get tweaked, albeit in tiny ways. The function does not preserve you in full. It preserves your effects, uses them to create the next state of the world, and then iterates again. These tweaks have resulted in an upwards exponential outline of progress which leaves behind abstract and concrete ideas alike, such as the umbrella which hid from me the stars.
In that sense, every person leaves behind a kind of ghost, not their full self, but the faint imprint of their quirks, faults, and strengths on the state of the world.
More interestingly, we’re beginning to reach a time when machines can, in a way, mimic humanity’s function, f. AI, in its simplest form, tries to mimic society’s function, f, and iterates on it, removing man’s main constraint: time. Humans, smart as they are, have always been limited by the fact that they get to be here and live for hopefully eighty years. In that short span of time, they have to operate within all of Earth’s and the universe’s limitations, such as the speed at which they move, the speed at which their brains can process information, and the inevitable passing of time.
Ultimately, though, time is also what allows us to enjoy the beauty of function f as it unfolds. Joy is not found in the numbers everything is eventually reduced to, but in admiring the lives, minds, triumphs and disasters that shaped the unassuming frame of the ordinary umbrella hiding the stars from my view.