Off Brain

We’ve been here before. Plato worried writing would ruin memory. Now professors worry AI will ruin thinking. But maybe outsourcing cognition has always been part of being human. In his new essay, @_hhff moves from Hinge date debates about David Lynch and Hayao Miyazaki, through ancient philosophy and cognitive science, to the possibility of a planetary brain. It asks: is AI the end of human thought, or simply its next extension? “The internet we know today has been for the most part a passive harness; requiring individual humans “crank the handle”. As the bandwidth and interconnectivity of our discrete conscious minds are faster linked, the internet may start to resemble an active “exocortex”, functioning like a coherent super-organism, capable of wise, compassionate action on a massively global scale. Human minds, as nodes in the system, would be brought to face their own own acute suffering and harm, finally allowing us to feel it all as a personal wound, and overcome our fragmented, short-sighted self-interest. The more entangled our humanity becomes with its own digital reflection, the more a vision of social justice not enforced by law, but naturally arising from shared experience may come.” Read the full article here.