(2021-10-16) Mikro2nd Cognition Enhancing Technologies

Mike Morris: Cognition Enhancing Technologies. I’m working with a non-profit org, We Think Code, that teaches software development skills (not just programming!) to people new-to-programming who likely might not otherwise have access to such opportunity. (learning programming)

This is by way of introducing why I’ve been thinking so much lately of my old friend/enemy/favourite problem: How might we design (and build, and evolve) software better.

A subset, really, of the broader problem of designing complex systems, itself a subset of the question, “How can we become better at thinking?”

most software is dismally shite.

All of which is my roundabout way of trying to explain why I got thinking about the Key Cognition-Enhancing Technologies we (humans) have invented/developed/evolved to date. (tools for thought)

once invented/discovered allow us to think in qualitatively different ways than we could before the invention

technologies that enable us to collaborate, cooperate and work better in groups have higher leverage and so must be regarded as more important. Or, at least, more powerful. More key.

Mike’s List of Key Cognition-Enhancing Technologies Nice list

• Pictorial representation/visual art.
• Music.*
• 12. Computer networks.

The real point is that these are technologies that actively hack our primate brains, allowing us to not merely think “more”, but to think “better” and most importantly to think in ways that were simply impossible prior to the evolution at each step.

Notice, too, how these CETs compound, one upon another. And accelerate. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, this makes me – a Singularity Atheist – worry that Kurzweil may have sussed something that I dis.

Somewhere in there I probably ought to put “Understanding how the mind functions” as a key CET. It’s still developing, but we seem to be making some progress in that area. ((2022-07-06) Hoel From Ai To Abortion The Scientific Failure To Understand Consciousness Harms The Nation)

I might easily have put wikis in the list of CETs somewhere (about 11.3, I suppose) but, while I think they certainly qualify as a CET, I don’t really regard them as a key CET. Wikis are more like reading and writing technology, with the advantage that writings may be arranged in a graph rather than only linearly. (hypertext)

I believe I am beginning to glimpse what it was that Goldberg, Engelbart and Kay were trying to do (and Vannevar Bush) in trying to build “live” or “active” documents (though “document” conveys a very poor image, indeed)

How might we build models (simulation) of complex systems faster and allow non-specialists to tweak their parameters

insight into fast-moving complex problems. Pandemics, disinformation campaigns, war. Right now the tools those people have are woefully antiquated, dismally inadequate, and it’s hurting us all. (Grand Challenges)