Limits — Perceived or Otherwise — of Human Thought
Inspiration strikes from bizarre places and yesterday it occurred while I watched a video from content creator Irate Bear. Irate Bear’s content differed widely from the topic here — but everything links to this subject — what stood out during a demonstration of hate Tweets aimed at the “Alt-Furry” community, was the format of the document, an 8,000-page PDF. Yes, you heard right, an 8,000-page PDF! Aside from the rather left-field subject matter, the sheer size of the thoughts and efforts contained therein got me pondering on the scale of human thought and where it can reach.
The last two decades have seen exponential growth in the way information is given and received. The rise of the internet from geeky corners of rooms (literally, given the size of computers at the time) to a now ubiquitous quasi-dimension that extends our lives out beyond our five senses, permeating whatever beliefs or ideas — no matter how lofty or stupid — we care to exhibit. In 2014, the internet passed the milestone of having more than a billion websites and the additional information therein contains the breadth of human creativity and knowledge as well as the depths of human depravity. It is a new millennium metaphor for the human condition, an anthropological imprint reaching far past what we once knew.
Having the entirety of civilised knowledge and otherwise within our grasp shows how adept people are at using the world around them to shape tools. From the wheel to the printing press, a rolling stone gathers no moss and the kinetic dash of 10,000 years gave us beasts of burden, pets, buildings, entertainment, learning. A dog for example, is a highly trained intelligent animal that thrives on a pack hierrachy. Serving its master, humans utilise the speed, strength and highly acute senses of a dog to augment our own existence, which reached out to horses and livestock. By 1900, a dramatic upshot in innovation, courtesy of the Industrial Revolution, allegedly led to the Commisioner of the US Patent Office, Charles H. Duell to claim that: “everything that can be invented has been invented!” In a sense he was right, engines, photography/cinema, radio — that led to TV — science/medicine, electrical currents, vehicles and the fossil fuels to power them, were all born of 19th century endeavour. Duell was wrong too, the jet engine, space travel, nuclear power, the internet, quantum physics and relativity all lay ahead. Artificial Intelligence is another aspect not contemplated in the 1800s, now it grows into a tangible prospect daily that computer technology might soon evolve awareness, many fearing that a tool of ours will become master. Though with their raison d’etre focused on enhancing human life, AI is set to merge with our intelligence in an event dubbed: “The Singularity.”
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself,” — Carl Sagan said and as conduits for the universe around us, a universe we can effect — like nature — becomes a canvas. The smaller computer chips become, shrinking to microscopic and blended with unlimited fusion energy that superconducts with total efficiency, AI may permit us to control nature itself, much like the Familiars in witchcraft folklore where animals are governed magically. Isaac Newton once said: “if I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants,” today we see into a hazy distance of uncertainty where all points have inevitably led. Michio Kaku foresees that by 2100 we will become the gods we once feared, 8,000-page PDFs certainly ape the pettiness of the Olympians of Greek myth!
