1. I think you’re too quick to dismiss what you call “oral tradition”. I’d suggest that *stories* are a kind of zeroth technology. Before written history, humans had already (for millennia!) found ways to embody their knowledge in ways that they could pass down. The basic function was narrative: folk tales, myths, and so on. By 0 AD there’s already 100-300m humans on the planet - many orders of magnitude more than the chimpanzees our nearest relatives. That suggest our cumulative knowledge was already doing a lot, before writing was widespread enough to have much effect.
2. AI may really be discovering deep principles. It just doesn’t know how to explain them to us yet. If that’s true, then work on interpretable AI may help these models tell us the new laws they have discovered. After all, there must be some regularity there, otherwise how could they make their predictions?
"Trade" was as critical as "history". Consider how many separate expert products go into a semiconductor factory. Or how the potter's wheel disappeared in Britain, after Rome's fall. Why? Because there was no longer enough population density and social trust to support full-time potters.
Without specialization, humans have a hard limit on their tools and productivity.
Without trade, there's not much room for specialization.
This is the first email I read in 2023 and my year is off to a good start.
I’m a mathematician and I always appreciate your portrayal of my field as powerful and relevant and not, as some seem to believe, an instrument of torture.
The distinction you draw between “understanding” and “control” helped me think about my relation to my own field. I (and many like me) see mathematics as something to be understood; “revel in the beauty of axiomatics” as one of my students put it. I feel good when I can understand the infinity of primes or why some sequences converge to some magic number and others do not. The experience itself is satisfying. Most of the rest of the world view my field as a tool which can help attain the control you describe, including my engineer husband and physicist daughter. I guess this is roughly the difference between pure and applied mathematics.
I had a professor in a graduate mathematical modeling class who told us that someday we would be able to model human behavior as accurately as we could then model science. We needed only to learn a sufficient amount about human behavior, which he believed was a certainty.
I gave the aforementioned daughter a subscription to this blog. I think she will like it.
I very much like the point about history being a form of magic, though would note that Chimpanzees do indeed pass tool making down generations. Goulgoulo Chimpanzees not only pass down tool traditions, but also use them in specific orders for step-wise problem solving. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1907476116
Which brings me to the main thought having read this article. The main distinction to be found isn’t dividing AI from science, but rather dividing certainty science and uncertainty science. To date the biggest improvements of our lives have been certainty calculations - the precise use of calculus or other elegant solutions to come to conclusions. This is most important in engineering and other applied fields. To me the natural end point of this type of math was string theory, the proposed reconciliation between general relativity and quantum dynamics. It is the end point because it is not falsifiable by its own rules - it may be correct, but we lack the ability to determine it scientifically.
The other tradition , uncertainty, is messier and for a long time was looked down upon. It has its roots with Bayes, Galton (Darwin’s cousin) and Ronald Fischer. Rather than try to precisely calculate solutions, it tries to draw lines around our ignorance. For a long time uncertainty was treated as a cheap trick to sell certainty in exchange for academic job security (see p-hacking). But with the advent of computers the necessary calculation power could explore the boundaries of that ignorance in ways that became a creative force. That is the origin of AI. The raw tools of AI are how to manage uncertainty. With sufficient complexity, it can be generative.
Which brings us back to the magic of history. The world was fundamentally chaotic. An old professor of mine once pointed out that if you took the most conservative population growth rates for any observed hunter-gatherer population and assumed that at the start of European migration into Eurasia, you’d expect 13 trillion people today (compound interest is a bitch). He reconciled the contradiction between comparatively low population and the compounding effects of observed growth rates with a small probability of cataclysm every generation - if something like 85% of the population was lost due to tragedy every once in a blue moon, the scales balance again. This non-linear impact of selective sweeps is also a big driver of evolution - if a species eats soft nuts normally but resorts to hard nuts when times are tough, then the beaks for cracking the refugia food become important, and would confuse researchers who observe the birds eating food that their beaks are over prepared for.
History, agriculture, and the scientific revolution each solved a cause of these precipitous population collapses. And each contributed to a non-linear change in population numbers. I do not know if AI will do the same. But if it does, it will be because statistics solves the same problem history did - how to confront our ignorance in a terrifyingly dynamic environment.
What a treat to start the year 2023. This article is kind of philosophy of logic and knowledge and a great treatise to human evolution that is not really explicitly mentioned but you address the most fundamental of the issues to plausibly argue the clear relevance of foundations of evolution with modern world. You are absolutely right and I guess the long understood message of evolutionary sciences has unfortunately been lost in white noise that so-called Trumps MAGA movement has started. For example, as you write and you are absolutely right that the difference between human social, economic and scientific evolution is directly proportional to our ability to record history through stories of our forefathers or noting down the techniques and that is what makes us different from animal kingdom. That is exactly what I have understood too and what I mean by that and what all the animal rights advocates have understood is that animals are not stupid by means of their cognitive evolution. For example, a dog that is such a friendly and amazing animal or any animal for that matter would have a cognitive understanding of basic mathematical expressions. For example a puppy understands the value zero or more when the puppy understand his mother is gone to fetch food and when the puppy is among other puppies of dogs. The qualitative complexity is also fed into animals by nature as they can differentiate between other species and characteristics like food and shelter. Why humans are different is all because of their physical characteristics rightly proposed by evolutionary theories. Due to our superior physical characteristics we humans can make complex sounds leading to complex words and languages and we can write. Well this also is a lesson for lot of fancy unrealistic science fiction or religious dogma where superiority is attributed to physical strength without adhering to the evolutionary logic that prevents any possibility of an intelligent deity or specie that for example may have ten hands or a face of an elephant but could invent spaceships to travel faster than light. This fact really cuts down the possibility of evolutionary characteristics of intelligent species in the universe as part if intergalactic civilizations. That is why in many of the writings I claim that humans are the most aesthetic life form in the universe and plausibly the best outcome of nature.
Thereby once your readers would understand the power of your starting lines of this blog, the brilliance of the article unravels in later parts.
Nature and humans are in the first place the marvel exhibit and as you also suggest the most scientific exhibit than any created by humans themselves and thereby despite the wonders of the modern world, the argument is supreme to preserve nature in perfect balance is the responsibility of the scientific world to understand and create models of scientific interactions of science itself and the natural world.
If you and me and many others can construct this argument, then I claim in few of my articles that the third person, that is AI would only be considered as intelligent if future 'intelligent' AI also understands this argument. In otherwards, if AI through us understand the natural world and its rules whereby we have been creating all the scientific and mathematical algorithms that may eventually capture the complexity of the natural world with their contextual controls, only then that AI can be considered as an intelligent extension of evolution. The first and most foundational information and DNA of such an AI is to understand that nature has to be preserved with the right balance where humans would still be at the central stage associated with natural life cycles of biology.
All what humans have so far created is mostly to the benefit of humanity whether it is economics or science but ancient and modern societies, the aware segments talk about preserving nature and harmony with nature and that is the central message of science as well that urban modern life has usually disavowed because economic models have simply failed to capture the complexity required to effectively create policy that can universally ensure it. We are still at the very early stages of economics and sociology while creating new cultures attributed to the rapid pace human scientific conquest is moving and consumer applications are introduced.
All in all, great way to start 2023 with this article and I hope, this article would restart debate among your readers that has been some what lost among futile race centric movements that have been started in the US.
Fascinating ideas. I especially agree with the notion that humans can accumulate and share innovation, whether technology or schools of thought. However, I propose stepping back to recognize two even more basic human abilities. I got these ideas from observing my very smart two year old grandson.
First is the ability to generalize. This involves humanity’s ability to extend a particular experience or thought and understand it as being relevant to seemingly unrelated experiences. This ability allows us to exploit those insights even when entirely new experiences are encountered.
The second is the ability to form abstractions. You cover this concept very well when you described how much we depend upon our ability to conduct “thought experiments”. Crucially, the insights realized from these virtual experiments can be efficiently documented and communicated across time and cultures.
I appreciate your enthusiasm but reading your post I am reminded of the 'sorcerer's apprentice' scene in Disney's Fantasia where the apprentice attempts to use his new power without understanding it creating all sorts of mayhem.
As a social scientist, I see a problem with our technology getting ahead of our sociology and psychology. Unleashing great powers without understanding and incorporating the consequences of these new powers is, frankly, horrifying.
All these bright, shiny "magics" can be a blessing or a curse. How do we 'humanize' or make these technologies humane before releasing them on the world?
"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely."
It’s great that you mentioned Google’s AlphaFold. Few understand how powerful it is to accurately predict protein folding. It will bring drug development into a new era and much more.
Noah, I found this piece lucid and inspiring, and I'm so glad I resubscribed recently. As the host of a podcast about Isaac Asimov's Foundation called Seldon Crisis, I've been pondering the concept of psychohistory for quite a while. In the novel, this was a mathematical approach to predicting the future based on the huge dataset available at the time the story is set - 20,000 years in the future or so - with a quintillion human beings and 30 millennia of past events as input. Most commentators since Asimov's time have dismissed this idea as impossibly naive considering complexity theory, but the principles you're describing here give me some hope that something like psychohistory may become more and more possible with the help of AI systems that act as a black box. In other words, we might not need to understand why the future can be predicted to a high degree of probability in order to do so.
I'd actually love to have you on the podcast sometime to chat about this. Please take a look at https://seldoncrisis.net and let me know if you're interested.
Thank you for a wonderfully articulate essay on a very important topic. I suppose there are downsides but I see your analysis as a most optimistic contribution to knowledge expansion. I enjoyed reading it and , I anticipate, will enjoy reading it many more times. Happy New Year.
This is an excellent essay, Noah. For me, it stitches together a few observations from very different places into a more cohesive narrative.
It's useful to actively think about what we can realistically hope to know, understand and control about complex systems. The natural sciences are a good demonstration that even when you do know the underlying rules and they are simple, applying them directly can be useless (e.g. one doesn't use the Standard Model to do chemistry, let alone model cells). Our expectations for understanding complex systems which are the result of human civilization (without such simple underlying rules) should be set correspondingly. Viewing AI as an approach to that fundamental challenge is a real change in perspective.
“The authors use deep neural nets (i.e., AI) to look at daytime satellite imagery, in order to predict future economic growth at the hyper-local level.”
From my reading of the paper by Khachiyan et al., they didn’t “predict” anything. They built a model that fit well with previous data. They built a model that describes something that already occurred. That’s not a prediction.
IF this model happened to also be an excellent predictor of economic growth over the next 10 years, and enough people knew about, then behaviors would change and destroy the model. For example, elected officials might move resources to an area that shows negative economic growth to try and improve it. Other speculators might begin to invest heavily in areas with high potential for economic growth, which could accelerate the growth, but also it could have the opposite effect, by creating a higher cost for the local resources like land.
In order to be mildly successful predictive models that people can impact must be kept secret. Simply publishing the model destroys it’s predictive ability - because behaviors change.
This post is really sending me thinking about where we are going.
Really like the last part understanding versus blindly predicting, knowing from data and about how economics has evolved because gets at something nagging me about assertions earlier in post.
One frustration I've often had with modern scientists like medical and economists is lack of ability to adapt to new compelling evidence and data in timely fashion simply because they can't know the exact causes, the only real thing to them is something with defined cause that simple algorithm can be written for, and don't change even when really world data is staring them in face (say min wage effects in economy or masking working to reduce spread of airborne disease to name some recent examples)
Feels like all of human time has been this struggle to balance and define "science" and "magic", verifiable data, versus legends, myths, stories
History was a early magic power for humans long before it was written. Now we may have new "magic" not that different.
More isolated, specific location cultures developed highly accurate and seemingly impossibly long oral traditions that have recorded astronomical data, geogolic events, and climate changes from thousands to 10,000+ years.ago. These accurate records were likely necessary for survival,.for hunting, fishing, farming knowledge, and likely only the cultures in certain that did this high priority oral traditions were cultures that survived, because these rigorous oral recordings are so common in so many places do world. Highly-disciplined oral histories, sometimes tied to simpler we're similar to what we did with books later and gave we humans advantage.
And this old way of observing and recording really has me thinking where we are going with our modern tech.
Oral traditions can be seen as messy by modern, Western eyes just as AI and ata driven non-understandable predictions are and as social media memes. Oral traditions used stories, songs, myths to aid in memory how stars moved or animals behaved and also reinforced culture for better results, survival, like stay away from that Crater Lake, volcano gods fight there, or run away from coast and to the inland after an earthquake and sea goes out, because it's a sign enemy tribe has cast a spell to create and tsunami. Which improves survival rate immensely compared to new settlers in area who are uneducated about tsunami dangers. See even modern people getting needlessly killed in Thailand for lack of education, maybe a scary myth would have helped transmission if this knowledge better than our books? Obviously places like Japan actually recorded in writing tsunami from 1000+ years ago and had wide preparations because of that and science, another way.
So after human populated whole world, sailed to remote we had period Noah describes where we had written history and science, and now with new tech we seem to be going back, maybe never really left that much, to observation, extrapolation without knowing causes, and stories myths being what shapes culture more effectively than science and books.
We now have AI and also memes doing more education than schools. Tik Tok and YouTube videos transferring more knowledge (or misinformation) than books. Tell people stories, raise their fears or give them characters and influence them.
And AI starts to act like magic.
When we don't know how reliable AI is, and yet it amazes us most of time, is it that different from Jsepth telling the pharaoh his dreams mean than will be 7 years of plenty followed by 7 years of famine?
A couple of comments.
1. I think you’re too quick to dismiss what you call “oral tradition”. I’d suggest that *stories* are a kind of zeroth technology. Before written history, humans had already (for millennia!) found ways to embody their knowledge in ways that they could pass down. The basic function was narrative: folk tales, myths, and so on. By 0 AD there’s already 100-300m humans on the planet - many orders of magnitude more than the chimpanzees our nearest relatives. That suggest our cumulative knowledge was already doing a lot, before writing was widespread enough to have much effect.
2. AI may really be discovering deep principles. It just doesn’t know how to explain them to us yet. If that’s true, then work on interpretable AI may help these models tell us the new laws they have discovered. After all, there must be some regularity there, otherwise how could they make their predictions?
"Trade" was as critical as "history". Consider how many separate expert products go into a semiconductor factory. Or how the potter's wheel disappeared in Britain, after Rome's fall. Why? Because there was no longer enough population density and social trust to support full-time potters.
Without specialization, humans have a hard limit on their tools and productivity.
Without trade, there's not much room for specialization.
This is the first email I read in 2023 and my year is off to a good start.
I’m a mathematician and I always appreciate your portrayal of my field as powerful and relevant and not, as some seem to believe, an instrument of torture.
The distinction you draw between “understanding” and “control” helped me think about my relation to my own field. I (and many like me) see mathematics as something to be understood; “revel in the beauty of axiomatics” as one of my students put it. I feel good when I can understand the infinity of primes or why some sequences converge to some magic number and others do not. The experience itself is satisfying. Most of the rest of the world view my field as a tool which can help attain the control you describe, including my engineer husband and physicist daughter. I guess this is roughly the difference between pure and applied mathematics.
I had a professor in a graduate mathematical modeling class who told us that someday we would be able to model human behavior as accurately as we could then model science. We needed only to learn a sufficient amount about human behavior, which he believed was a certainty.
I gave the aforementioned daughter a subscription to this blog. I think she will like it.
I very much like the point about history being a form of magic, though would note that Chimpanzees do indeed pass tool making down generations. Goulgoulo Chimpanzees not only pass down tool traditions, but also use them in specific orders for step-wise problem solving. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1907476116
Which brings me to the main thought having read this article. The main distinction to be found isn’t dividing AI from science, but rather dividing certainty science and uncertainty science. To date the biggest improvements of our lives have been certainty calculations - the precise use of calculus or other elegant solutions to come to conclusions. This is most important in engineering and other applied fields. To me the natural end point of this type of math was string theory, the proposed reconciliation between general relativity and quantum dynamics. It is the end point because it is not falsifiable by its own rules - it may be correct, but we lack the ability to determine it scientifically.
The other tradition , uncertainty, is messier and for a long time was looked down upon. It has its roots with Bayes, Galton (Darwin’s cousin) and Ronald Fischer. Rather than try to precisely calculate solutions, it tries to draw lines around our ignorance. For a long time uncertainty was treated as a cheap trick to sell certainty in exchange for academic job security (see p-hacking). But with the advent of computers the necessary calculation power could explore the boundaries of that ignorance in ways that became a creative force. That is the origin of AI. The raw tools of AI are how to manage uncertainty. With sufficient complexity, it can be generative.
Which brings us back to the magic of history. The world was fundamentally chaotic. An old professor of mine once pointed out that if you took the most conservative population growth rates for any observed hunter-gatherer population and assumed that at the start of European migration into Eurasia, you’d expect 13 trillion people today (compound interest is a bitch). He reconciled the contradiction between comparatively low population and the compounding effects of observed growth rates with a small probability of cataclysm every generation - if something like 85% of the population was lost due to tragedy every once in a blue moon, the scales balance again. This non-linear impact of selective sweeps is also a big driver of evolution - if a species eats soft nuts normally but resorts to hard nuts when times are tough, then the beaks for cracking the refugia food become important, and would confuse researchers who observe the birds eating food that their beaks are over prepared for.
History, agriculture, and the scientific revolution each solved a cause of these precipitous population collapses. And each contributed to a non-linear change in population numbers. I do not know if AI will do the same. But if it does, it will be because statistics solves the same problem history did - how to confront our ignorance in a terrifyingly dynamic environment.
"Do we need to understand things in order to predict and control them?"
For some reason, that makes me think of von Neumann's quote, “All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control”.
Dear Noah,
What a treat to start the year 2023. This article is kind of philosophy of logic and knowledge and a great treatise to human evolution that is not really explicitly mentioned but you address the most fundamental of the issues to plausibly argue the clear relevance of foundations of evolution with modern world. You are absolutely right and I guess the long understood message of evolutionary sciences has unfortunately been lost in white noise that so-called Trumps MAGA movement has started. For example, as you write and you are absolutely right that the difference between human social, economic and scientific evolution is directly proportional to our ability to record history through stories of our forefathers or noting down the techniques and that is what makes us different from animal kingdom. That is exactly what I have understood too and what I mean by that and what all the animal rights advocates have understood is that animals are not stupid by means of their cognitive evolution. For example, a dog that is such a friendly and amazing animal or any animal for that matter would have a cognitive understanding of basic mathematical expressions. For example a puppy understands the value zero or more when the puppy understand his mother is gone to fetch food and when the puppy is among other puppies of dogs. The qualitative complexity is also fed into animals by nature as they can differentiate between other species and characteristics like food and shelter. Why humans are different is all because of their physical characteristics rightly proposed by evolutionary theories. Due to our superior physical characteristics we humans can make complex sounds leading to complex words and languages and we can write. Well this also is a lesson for lot of fancy unrealistic science fiction or religious dogma where superiority is attributed to physical strength without adhering to the evolutionary logic that prevents any possibility of an intelligent deity or specie that for example may have ten hands or a face of an elephant but could invent spaceships to travel faster than light. This fact really cuts down the possibility of evolutionary characteristics of intelligent species in the universe as part if intergalactic civilizations. That is why in many of the writings I claim that humans are the most aesthetic life form in the universe and plausibly the best outcome of nature.
Thereby once your readers would understand the power of your starting lines of this blog, the brilliance of the article unravels in later parts.
Nature and humans are in the first place the marvel exhibit and as you also suggest the most scientific exhibit than any created by humans themselves and thereby despite the wonders of the modern world, the argument is supreme to preserve nature in perfect balance is the responsibility of the scientific world to understand and create models of scientific interactions of science itself and the natural world.
If you and me and many others can construct this argument, then I claim in few of my articles that the third person, that is AI would only be considered as intelligent if future 'intelligent' AI also understands this argument. In otherwards, if AI through us understand the natural world and its rules whereby we have been creating all the scientific and mathematical algorithms that may eventually capture the complexity of the natural world with their contextual controls, only then that AI can be considered as an intelligent extension of evolution. The first and most foundational information and DNA of such an AI is to understand that nature has to be preserved with the right balance where humans would still be at the central stage associated with natural life cycles of biology.
All what humans have so far created is mostly to the benefit of humanity whether it is economics or science but ancient and modern societies, the aware segments talk about preserving nature and harmony with nature and that is the central message of science as well that urban modern life has usually disavowed because economic models have simply failed to capture the complexity required to effectively create policy that can universally ensure it. We are still at the very early stages of economics and sociology while creating new cultures attributed to the rapid pace human scientific conquest is moving and consumer applications are introduced.
All in all, great way to start 2023 with this article and I hope, this article would restart debate among your readers that has been some what lost among futile race centric movements that have been started in the US.
Thanks for sharing, I appreciate you.
Fascinating ideas. I especially agree with the notion that humans can accumulate and share innovation, whether technology or schools of thought. However, I propose stepping back to recognize two even more basic human abilities. I got these ideas from observing my very smart two year old grandson.
First is the ability to generalize. This involves humanity’s ability to extend a particular experience or thought and understand it as being relevant to seemingly unrelated experiences. This ability allows us to exploit those insights even when entirely new experiences are encountered.
The second is the ability to form abstractions. You cover this concept very well when you described how much we depend upon our ability to conduct “thought experiments”. Crucially, the insights realized from these virtual experiments can be efficiently documented and communicated across time and cultures.
Great post, it seems really plausible for ai and humans to go this way. Thanks!
I appreciate your enthusiasm but reading your post I am reminded of the 'sorcerer's apprentice' scene in Disney's Fantasia where the apprentice attempts to use his new power without understanding it creating all sorts of mayhem.
As a social scientist, I see a problem with our technology getting ahead of our sociology and psychology. Unleashing great powers without understanding and incorporating the consequences of these new powers is, frankly, horrifying.
All these bright, shiny "magics" can be a blessing or a curse. How do we 'humanize' or make these technologies humane before releasing them on the world?
"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely."
E. O. Wilson
It’s great that you mentioned Google’s AlphaFold. Few understand how powerful it is to accurately predict protein folding. It will bring drug development into a new era and much more.
Can’t wait to see the next iterations of AI.
Noah, I found this piece lucid and inspiring, and I'm so glad I resubscribed recently. As the host of a podcast about Isaac Asimov's Foundation called Seldon Crisis, I've been pondering the concept of psychohistory for quite a while. In the novel, this was a mathematical approach to predicting the future based on the huge dataset available at the time the story is set - 20,000 years in the future or so - with a quintillion human beings and 30 millennia of past events as input. Most commentators since Asimov's time have dismissed this idea as impossibly naive considering complexity theory, but the principles you're describing here give me some hope that something like psychohistory may become more and more possible with the help of AI systems that act as a black box. In other words, we might not need to understand why the future can be predicted to a high degree of probability in order to do so.
I'd actually love to have you on the podcast sometime to chat about this. Please take a look at https://seldoncrisis.net and let me know if you're interested.
Thank you for a wonderfully articulate essay on a very important topic. I suppose there are downsides but I see your analysis as a most optimistic contribution to knowledge expansion. I enjoyed reading it and , I anticipate, will enjoy reading it many more times. Happy New Year.
This is an excellent essay, Noah. For me, it stitches together a few observations from very different places into a more cohesive narrative.
It's useful to actively think about what we can realistically hope to know, understand and control about complex systems. The natural sciences are a good demonstration that even when you do know the underlying rules and they are simple, applying them directly can be useless (e.g. one doesn't use the Standard Model to do chemistry, let alone model cells). Our expectations for understanding complex systems which are the result of human civilization (without such simple underlying rules) should be set correspondingly. Viewing AI as an approach to that fundamental challenge is a real change in perspective.
“The authors use deep neural nets (i.e., AI) to look at daytime satellite imagery, in order to predict future economic growth at the hyper-local level.”
From my reading of the paper by Khachiyan et al., they didn’t “predict” anything. They built a model that fit well with previous data. They built a model that describes something that already occurred. That’s not a prediction.
IF this model happened to also be an excellent predictor of economic growth over the next 10 years, and enough people knew about, then behaviors would change and destroy the model. For example, elected officials might move resources to an area that shows negative economic growth to try and improve it. Other speculators might begin to invest heavily in areas with high potential for economic growth, which could accelerate the growth, but also it could have the opposite effect, by creating a higher cost for the local resources like land.
In order to be mildly successful predictive models that people can impact must be kept secret. Simply publishing the model destroys it’s predictive ability - because behaviors change.
This post is really sending me thinking about where we are going.
Really like the last part understanding versus blindly predicting, knowing from data and about how economics has evolved because gets at something nagging me about assertions earlier in post.
One frustration I've often had with modern scientists like medical and economists is lack of ability to adapt to new compelling evidence and data in timely fashion simply because they can't know the exact causes, the only real thing to them is something with defined cause that simple algorithm can be written for, and don't change even when really world data is staring them in face (say min wage effects in economy or masking working to reduce spread of airborne disease to name some recent examples)
Feels like all of human time has been this struggle to balance and define "science" and "magic", verifiable data, versus legends, myths, stories
History was a early magic power for humans long before it was written. Now we may have new "magic" not that different.
More isolated, specific location cultures developed highly accurate and seemingly impossibly long oral traditions that have recorded astronomical data, geogolic events, and climate changes from thousands to 10,000+ years.ago. These accurate records were likely necessary for survival,.for hunting, fishing, farming knowledge, and likely only the cultures in certain that did this high priority oral traditions were cultures that survived, because these rigorous oral recordings are so common in so many places do world. Highly-disciplined oral histories, sometimes tied to simpler we're similar to what we did with books later and gave we humans advantage.
And this old way of observing and recording really has me thinking where we are going with our modern tech.
Oral traditions can be seen as messy by modern, Western eyes just as AI and ata driven non-understandable predictions are and as social media memes. Oral traditions used stories, songs, myths to aid in memory how stars moved or animals behaved and also reinforced culture for better results, survival, like stay away from that Crater Lake, volcano gods fight there, or run away from coast and to the inland after an earthquake and sea goes out, because it's a sign enemy tribe has cast a spell to create and tsunami. Which improves survival rate immensely compared to new settlers in area who are uneducated about tsunami dangers. See even modern people getting needlessly killed in Thailand for lack of education, maybe a scary myth would have helped transmission if this knowledge better than our books? Obviously places like Japan actually recorded in writing tsunami from 1000+ years ago and had wide preparations because of that and science, another way.
So after human populated whole world, sailed to remote we had period Noah describes where we had written history and science, and now with new tech we seem to be going back, maybe never really left that much, to observation, extrapolation without knowing causes, and stories myths being what shapes culture more effectively than science and books.
We now have AI and also memes doing more education than schools. Tik Tok and YouTube videos transferring more knowledge (or misinformation) than books. Tell people stories, raise their fears or give them characters and influence them.
And AI starts to act like magic.
When we don't know how reliable AI is, and yet it amazes us most of time, is it that different from Jsepth telling the pharaoh his dreams mean than will be 7 years of plenty followed by 7 years of famine?