Information, Bandwidth, and Trust

In today's increasingly connected world, there arises a big question of whether all these developments are hampering Human creativity or not. So, does these advancements and constant pursuit for more information and dependence on technology hamper our creativity?

Premise

I truly believe that what we are limited by is not constraints of resources (although in the short term – yes) but rather by our ability to become more knowledgeable species. This post “Are we running out of resources?” gives a great logical justification on why, even if we are – our knowledge and skills will greatly improve using those resources.

Resources are not limited. Only human knowledge is limited. Should any particular resource begin to run short, our creativity will bring into being the knowledge of how to replace that resource from either some other source or by using some other means to accomplish what that resource did.

With shortage of coal / petroleum we are coming up with better greener energy sources. With production of cement being more and more resource intensive; new materials and designs are in making for constructing buildings in a greener & safer way.

The now is the future

We always think the next year, decade, century is the most important for deciding our future. People predicted the collapse of modern society as coal will run out; the worry for the rebuild after world war to fail. The people in 17-1800s thought their time to be crutial in defining the future of modern world based on science and experiments. The Greeks thought how significant their philosophy was to define the future and so on. In fact, the current state of humanity is not due to one such advancement, but a compounding effect of all of them.

This is about knowledge. It's the 'truth' now how it is shared and conveyed is what I call “Information”. The process of piecing together this information is Knowledge.

Me stating that tomorrow will be a rainy day is a piece of information. It's not knowledge – it is the condensed form of knowledge used to determine that condition. And most of the time that information is more than sufficient.

* The problems occur when that information is taken as enlightened knowledge and further drained / condensed.

Tech and Humans

It's known that technology widely influences human behavior and culture. AI has been shown to make its own interpretation of culture from its learning, and that is being passed on to us. Chess players have for the last couple of years used engines to find out new ideas about playing chess – new patterns/openings/insights never known before.

All the advancements in language modelling seem worrying, but are a new phase of the age of information. Image generation models like DALLE2 & imagen will be groundbreaking when polished a little more in giving the ability to people to condense information in a single glimpse-able data point (aka a picture).

We as humans should be taking advantage of these technologies to communicate with each other in better ways. The power of language, communication & collaboration is what made us (humans), come such a far way. This will enhance it.

So...

These were just some random thoughts I had on how we have evolved our information game and more importantly why sometimes not relying just on information is super important. With every form of transmission, we are losing a bit of information; so our focus should be on gaining knowledge rather than just sharing information