Just one, the ability to use language, it's causing all sorts of problems for us because we evolved to recognize other humans as the only ones having this capability.
Ai separated humans from language, like the writing did for memory and the printing press for knowledge distribution.
"AI does to us what American Cheese did to food" by Opus 23
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CbmC2aWhjY
(still the best Ai video I have seen, also a work of art)
Rarely do I sit through a 40 minute youtube video end to end, fully engaged - above was one of them.
It is the only video in that channel, and worth it.
Truly a one-hit wonder!
He has some ambitions for more videos, based on comment replies, but it would be way more legendary to have a single video forever, make a new channel and I'll sub to that one too
> like the writing did for memory and the printing press for knowledge distribution
This blob of text seems to mean nothing
I'm not actually sure how you could come to that conclusion.
Maybe you need to learn more about the language uplift.
There being terms and relations doesn't mean that they relate in the way that is supposed here.
"writing" isn't a technology in a video game that you research and improves the knowledge preservation instantly. It has a lot of components that it needs to be effective in the way that is described here, and it really wasn't that effective even coming to way later ages than the age that it was "found"(?).
The relations described here aren't anologous to "Ai separated humans from language" so they seem like just some arbitrary things to say on the side.
watch the Opus 23 video, he uses many more words more eloquently, it's really a top notch production
What happened to the knowledge in the elder's mind when they died, prior to writing? What changed about that once we had writing?
ever heard of the game "telephone"?
yup, what always happened in the end?
why is writing things down better?
>why is writing things down better?
For the same reason we make kids write out math problems rather than just reciting them. It engages different parts of the brain for one, you gain an expanded amount of context by doing so.
The next thing has to do with human memory, when you remember something it is never read only. Recalling memory can adjust your neurons and change the memory, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Hence why eyewitness testimony is mostly trash.
Writing it down also provides a larger workspace for making changes that you can loop over. Quite often things sound fine in our mind, then we write it, and reread it and we realize its wrong. These days people commonly use this in agentic workflows. One agent will conceptualize an idea, and then it's passed off to another agent with a clean context to review for logical flaws. Reading ones own text does the same things for humans, we don't load the full memory context of what we wrote and it seemingly allows us to iterate over the problem differently.
And I guess lastly, human voice is very low bandwidth. A wagon full of well written books is far easier to manage than the humans that contain that knowledge. The reader is at their leisure to learn and the speaker isn't inconvenienced by being at someones beck and call.
I agree with your premise, but writing things down is not "better" but "different". Oral histories have a strange rapid way of evolving by only preserving structure that matters to many and contributes to fitness of many. Cultures that didnt know how to transmit the "right" parts of oral history, they ceased to be that same failed culture, and became another culture made of those new stories.
Writing locks in and requires the evolution of other forms of evolution, as the Word can no longer evolve during transmission.
I say that while being firmly on your side in the larger back-and-forth exchange here :)
I was thinking about this when I almost had to walk under a ladder the other day (and get bad luck). That one seems like an oral story that arose from people being hurt, whereas crossing the path of a black cat, while also supposedly bestowing bad luck, seems to have no plausible rationale.
I like this thought. Maybe some things are just like astrology, just Schelling points that everyone decided meant something, and simple "heightened awareness" gets scaffolded into it. That heightened awareness is the selective pressure for a set of observations to persist, even if arbitrary :) but sometimes there's a rhyme to the reason, and something that cant be clocked to one thing is somehow at the center of an idea
what happens in the end was my entire point, and the refutation of your point. wtf? writing things down is a superior form of information retention and accuracy than verbal recitation and memory, obviously.