The examination of historical precedents, in which certain cognitive technologies invented by humankind (alphabet, scientific instruments, photography) resulted in the emergence of new forms of human intelligence through the ingenuity of a few humans, favors the analysis of the advent of Artificial Intelligence to try to imagine the future forms of Extended Intelligence, that is, the forms that human intellect will take as it interacts with the cognitive revolution of AI.
It should be made clear that the historical scope of AI is not limited to specific subject areas, as it was in the past for the scientific revolution or contemporary art, but is comparable to the impact of the alphabet, which has affected the entire human society and culture.
If the advent of writing led to the transition from prehistory to history, we are then facing a revolution that could be called post-history.
One of the defining aspects of this era is the acceleration of time, or more accurately the evolution of technology and human civilization.
This acceleration already began in the 1960s, when Moore’s Law was enunciated: “The complexity of a microcircuit, measured for example by the number of transistors per chip, doubles every 18 months.” With Artificial Intelligence, deep learning and other related technologies, the acceleration has further increased.
Speed also concerns the execution of digital machine processes, which have long since surpassed that of the human brain according to several parameters, from the speed of execution to the accuracy of the result. In our daily lives we are constantly using digital processes, with or without AI, that are much faster than our minds, for example, in computation, web search, street navigation, and now also in content generation.
None of this has resulted in an evolutionary leap in human intelligence to date, but we are only at the beginning.
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