The Tools We Made That Made Us

we may already be co-dependent

I mentioned Language as the original human tool in my last post. I was referencing what we commonly refer to as language, spoken, because it’s one of the first tools that we can point to which played a major role in shaping who we are today. We weren’t the only beings to develop it and assuredly not the first. But we maybe harnessed it in a way that uniquely changed the structure of our big fat brain.

Spoken language wasn’t our first language, though. Language is a tool to pass information from one thing to another. We know that our DNA stores the information that makes us who we are. We’ve learned recently that there are many species on the planet who can change their DNA in their lifetime and we’re starting to believe we can, too, both through natural processes and with science we can clip DNA into our genome. For millenia, perhaps, natural selection was the first ‘language,’ it just took generations to say much at all. Homo sapiens with certain traits encoded into DNA survived better, which ‘told’ the next generation that was a good thing. DNA stored the info, natural selection ‘read’ it, and the natural world was the ‘editor.’ And it’s looking like, with recent research, that it’s much more of a conversation than random mutations which guide change.

Spoken language compressed evolutionary timelines. The speed with which we could communicate what’s best for survival in the natural world increased dramatically. We shifted from genetic evolution, which we all learn about and wonder why it feels so different now, to ‘informational evolution’ where passage and incorporation of spoken information changed the survival dynamic from strength and endurance to cooperation, storytelling, and memory.

Our genome expanded from just the information in our DNA to the information in our DNA and the information we could remember and tell to our offspring - “That flower is poisonous, don’t eat it” - all by itself, at some point, changed the evolution of our species in an area with a lot of poisonous flowers. The people who could speak it, and the ones who could understand it, survived better.

Many animals have this capability, too. So.....that’s incomplete. The next big step, which maybe is even larger than spoken language, was written language. Now we could evolve faster than someone can tell people about poisonous flowers. If someone wrote it down, many more people could read it and know about the poisonous flower. We have not just the stories of the generations before us that are still alive, but the stories of every generation from that moment on. Data and information started to accumulate. Coordination, institutions, cities, laws began to select who was best suited to not just survive anymore, but thrive. And people who thrived were able to procreate more than people who didnt. Survival of the ‘fittest’ was not THE thing anymore. Theoretically, anyone could survive by reading the right passages. Thriving became the selector.

But people still had to find the right written language that suited their situation best to apply the tool for their benefit. Then came the internet. No longer did you “need” a library card. All of the information started to accumulate digitally, technically in the language of 1s and 0s, but the presented in our preferred language. Now the speed with which we could acquire the information was dramatically faster than the speed it took to learn it. Narrative and virality dominated what gets absorbed by the brain and became the new selector. Not for individuals anymore, but for cultures. Culture became the new evolutionary unit. Time compressed again. We moved from informational evolution to communicative evolution.

An aside - our bodies have not adapted to this speed of evolution, but maybe our brain has...even though our brains consciously thinking we have is wrong...so who knows. We are navigating a battle between our conscious brain that thinks free will is guiding us and biological processes that happen way faster than conscious thought. Even something as simple as “I feel an itch, i shall scratch it,” which feels absolutely, totally, 100% consciously willed to happen actually starts subconsciously well before we think we made the decision to do that. Our conscious brain is best for planning and such. Our subconscious - this beautiful, complex, always on, always analyzing, always predicting the future, the most integrated brain on the planet - just maybe is either adapting just fine or actually guiding this time compression. Either way, our conscious mind needs real tools - presence, self-reflection, integration - as examples, to keep up with the speed of all these external tools. And The Puzzle is a great lens for all this...just saying.

Anyways, on to the new tool that we’re now scrambling to wrap our conscious thoughts around - Artificial Intelligence. Not only do we have all of the information of all of the generations before us at our fingertips, we now have help interpreting and applying all of it, at once, to our lives. This could be the dawn of ‘cognitive evolution.’ One could argue it is potentially moving us to the role of cogs in the wheel, like cells in our body, that are doing the things we normally do, but are now unconscious to the role we play in a larger evolutionary jump. In that case we still benefit from it, but not in the way we did prior. Humanity could become the new evolutionary unit. But also it could be the final freedom from competition as a guardrail for thriving. Buckminster Fuller dreamed of such a world:

“What is it you were thinking about as a child before someone told you you had to earn a living?”

What if AI compresses time so much that our concept of living changes. The homo sapien “f*ck it or kill it” competitive wiring becomes irrelevant. At the risk of getting too woo-woo, this could come as a great awakening, of sorts. Hellen Keller recounted living in a “no-world” without true awareness or abstract thought before language: “Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world... I had neither will nor intellect.” The breakthrough came at age 6 or 7 when Sullivan spelled “w-a-t-e-r” into her hand under a pump, awakening her mind: “That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought.”

If spoken (err, signed) language can immediately change the consciousness of an individual......maybe AI will quickly change our capacity for abundance leading our collective consciousness to one where our individual uniqueness provides the real value to the Collective Puzzle and we’re celebrated for it. A boy can dream.