We've been merging with tools since the beginning of human evolution, and arguably, that's one of the things that makes us human beings.
Interpretation
Human evolution is deeply intertwined with the use of tools, which is a defining characteristic of our species.
The quote by Franklin Foer emphasizes the intrinsic relationship between humans and the tools we create and use. It suggests that our ability to innovate and merge with technology is not just a modern phenomenon, but a foundational aspect of our evolution, shaping what it means to be human and allowing us to adapt and thrive in various environments.
In practice
During a presentation on human evolution, one might quote this to illustrate how technology has shaped our species.
The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.
I grew up using maps and having a sense of direction, and now I have a phone. I used to try to remember numbers, and now I... can just call them up instantly. And that's great. But what's happening right now is that we're in a phase of human evolution where we're merging with machines.
The faux now of Twitter updates and things pinging at you - all the pulses from digitality that we try to keep up with because we sense that there's something going on that we need to tap into - are artifacts, or symptoms of living in this atemporal reality. And it's not any worse than living in the 'time is money' reality that we're leaving.
Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.
We want to build systems that can generalize to a new task. Being able to do things with much less data and with much less computation is going to be interesting and important.
If I had taken a proprietary control of the Web, then it would never have taken off. People only committed their time to it because they knew it was open, shared: that they could help decide what would happen to it next.. and I wouldn't be raking off 10%!
You're not going to tell me they built fifty-foot-high killer golems, are you?" "Only a man would think of that. It's our job," said Moist. "If you don't think of fifty-foot-high killer golems first, someone else will.
Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.
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