Modern life and intelligence

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I think we're reconfiguring our cognition. Who remembers phone numbers anymore? Who remembered seven digit numbers before there were phones? As tech does more stuff for us we can offload more and more of our cognitive function to it. GPS is better at nav than a brain so why bother using inferior brain-nav systems? Habit? Of course the downside is, unused functions will atrophy.

Once we have ubiquitous AR, things like facial recognition (an area that machines already outperform us on) will fall by the wayside. Leave the meat to do what it does best - creative problem solving, emotional intelligence, artistic shit. Ditch the stuff we're useless at - counting, memory, data analysis. We're already most of the way there. The stuff our current machines are doing are light years in advance of our capabilities but there's still this mechanical interface that prevents us outsourcing the last vestiges. Checking your change at the counter. Knowing what day it is. That'll pass.

We're becoming vastly more intelligent but it's an aggregate gain - us plus our technology.

A lot of the technologies we are just on the verge of developing will answer some of the most important questions this brings up, even if not many people are asking those questions yet. Taking this cognitive offloading thing to logical extremes, will there be a point where consciousness itself is offloaded to this "exocortex"? Could it be that the distinction between "me" and "you" becomes entirely irrelevant, even in a firsthand subjective sense?

It may be that our social networking reaches a point where what we can accomplish as an intelligent species grows exponentially, while what we can accomplish as individuals atrophies completely, to the point where our physical bodies are vestigial organs of a cybernetic hive mind. I, personally, would not object to that at all.

[P3nT4gR4m]

The current iteration of my ego is such that I can't imagine being predominantly "Us" rather than "Me" but who knows, maybe this will pass as I gradually slide into the new hyper-consciousness.