In Regression Planning, I wrote on whether we could re-learn the skills we have outsourced if events force us to. I read The Book of M recently, and it led me in a different direction on the same subject. The book is fiction set in a dangerous future, where people lose their shadows. What starts as a curiosity takes a dangerous turn when they realise that with the shadow goes memories. All kinds of memories – from their life thus far to the knowledge that they have to eat to survive. The extreme case is forgetting how to breathe. Imagine feeling suffocated and ultimately dying when all that’s needed is to draw a breath. Yes, it’s extreme and yes, it’s fiction. And isn’t that just instinct, you would ask. Yes, again.
Yuval Noah Harari writes in”21 lessons from the 21st century” about how in March 2012, three Japanese tourists in Australia drove their car into the Pacific Ocean, thanks to their unwavering trust in the GPS. Apparently it kept saying it would navigate them to a road! You could shake your head and quote Einstein on the infiniteness of human stupidity, but I don’t think it’s that simple. A better question to ask would be why they didn’t trust their intuition.
We all have intuitions and intelligence that we develop over a period of time. We become smart, or that’s how it’s supposed to work! But is that really so now? The smartphone was only the first step. Devices and even ambient environments are becoming smart. In a few decades we have moved from machines that help in physical tasks to systems that are taking over cognitive tasks, something Kevin Kelly has written about in The Inevitable. We’re increasingly outsourcing intelligence. The silver lining is that we’re at least trying to ensure it stays comprehensible to us!
Instagram, Facebook, Tinder, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon – everything is a feed of recommendations, whether it be social interactions, music, content or shopping! Once upon a time, these were conscious choices we made. These choices, new discoveries, their outcomes, the feedback loop, and the memories we store of them, all worked towards developing intuition. Beneath the cognitive skills we display externally is the wiring, and as the saying goes, Neurons that fire together, wire together. I think we’re now in the process of firing intuition and outsourcing it to algorithms. I don’t know what will happen first – advances in cognitive neuroscience, or the outsourcing. The hope is that they will happen in parallel and we will make choices about them after conscious reasoning.
Intelligence, intuition and instincts. The journeys in the first two are what have gotten the third hardwired into our biology and chemistry. When we cut off the pipeline to the first two, what happens to the third, and where does it leave our species? What is the organism that has artificial instincts?
