Agents, Omnimaths, and Groupthink

The Evolution of Intelligence in the Information Age

There is a long-standing debate about whether artificial intelligence will be a wholly separate autonomous intelligence or whether it will be an augmentation of human intelligence, a digital symbiosis (the actual conceptual development of AI started with Thomas Hobbes and threw Descartes into his chaotic struggle to find certainty in a deterministic universe) .

One of the key figures who came down on the side of AUGMENTATION was J Licklider. He also became a key figure in starting the PC revolution while he reformed early DARPA and focused the conversation on PCs with networks of computers rather than giant computers to detect whether the Soviets were coming to bomb the US over the Arctic Circle.

Now with the giant hype cycle that just came to a resetting of expectations we can analyze what that hype cycle was promoting:

AUTONOMOUS INTELLIGENCE

Agents.

I've asked over and over again if someone can show me an agent. All I hear is agents, agents, agents, and I've only seen one (Replit in the world of software engineering which is the most amendable to autonomy).

Obviously it will be a bit of both (augmentation and autonomy), autonomous cars are now taking people for trips (some of whom are probably also tripping at the same time because it's running in SF 😂 )

What excites me most is augmentation of human intelligence. Ever since the great polymaths mentioned above did their groundbreaking foundational work, individual leverage in the STEM fields continues to accrue to groups of human beings rather than sole contrarian individuals.

Don't get me wrong, groups are great. Groups of humans offer something called opponent processing which allows the group to become more than the sum of the parts.

But group think is a dangerous phenomenon that if you have been paying attention radically shifted our society in 2020 down a path that was clearly harmful, most directly to children.

With the rise of Big Science after Rutherford found that electrons could pass through a solid gold sheet, ground breaking science could only be done with billions of dollars for the giant specialized machines and large teams like the Manhattan project.

Now with human augmentation, we may be in for a surprise that will bring leverage back to the AI-enabled omnimaths who can have more choice as to whether they leverage AI without groupthink or trust in groups to have the other form of individual augmentation (one that can be codependent or interdependent)

I don't pretend to be a scientist, but I love thinking about the history and the philosophy of science. For me, the real augmentation is coming from my journalistic instincts to try and unravel what is happening to the US legal system as the Empire transforms from a nation-state to an information state.

Be careful, if you are following here this may turn into a civic educational site as I try to unwind exactly what the new admin will do to leverage the Chevron ruling which denies the 'three-letter agencies' leverage