The evolutionary leaps of intelligence

Historical precedents can be very useful in understanding how humans will be able to face and meet the challenge with the cognitive technology of Artificial Intelligence, which comes with disturbing aspects that are difficult to interpret and predict.

Let us try to tell a story never entirely told, that of the revolutions in human intelligence triggered by the interaction with cognitive technologies that human intelligence has been able to produce over the millennia. These are in some cases true passages of civilization, while in other situations we can analyze profound cultural transitions in specific fields, such as science or art.

Let’s start with a short list of technologies and their evolutionary leaps:

Cognitive Technology	Cognitive Revolution	Epoch	Mutation genes
Protosinaitic Alphabet	Drive renunciation and abstract thought	13th century B.C.	Moses
Greek letters and numbers	Philosophical writing	7th century BC.	Presocratic philosophers
Prospectograph	Renaissance perspective	15th century CE.	Brunelleschi and Alberti
Moveable type printing	Freedom of printing	15th century CE.	Gutenberg
Instruments of observation and measurement	Scientific revolution	17th century CE.	Galileo, Newton
Photography	Contemporary art	19th century CE.	Avant-garde artists
Telecommunications and mass media	TV: the multisensory involvement	20th century CE.	Marconi
Internet	Information society	20th century CE.	Berners-Lee