Source item

The original singularity. https://t.co/zfKvomwkQz The economic singularity. https://t.co/tcI4CJAeLS Some say technology is anti-human. But humanity is actually distinguished from animals by its use of technology. Clothes instead of fur. Tools in lieu of fangs. Even cooking simplified stomachs. The expensive tissue hypothesis stipulates that each such technological upgrade allowed more nutrients to be acquired and spent on the brain. So, for millions of years, evolution has been reducing humanity’s dependence on “hardware” (fur, fangs, stomachs) in favor of general purpose “software” that humans can run on their brains. Which is also the direction of technology today. That means we live inside a Russian doll of nested singularities: from the cognitive ascent of hominids to the economic ascent of capitalism to the contemporary ascent of technology. In other words, what’s actually natural for humans is the use of technology to achieve exponential improvements first in computation, and then in living standards. What is natural is the exponential.