> on the shoulders of giants
I think it’s tempting to accept the status quo without sufficient awe of “how we got here”.
Newton’s three laws? It's easy to think those are trivial. I learned them first semester of college. If I ever forgot one these days, I could go straight to Wikipedia to find it explained in simple terms. It seems trivial, until you think about all that work studying things like the bizarre motions of certain lights in the night sky (planets) which was needed in order to get there. And the “simple” terms like “acceleration” relies on other concepts like derivatives and calculus, something else they had to cobble together out of thin air.
And stepping back, we observe every day that there are living things around us (and we are one of them). It’s the status quo, we’ve seen living things ever since we were born, why should that be surprising or awe inspiring? Setting aside religious explanations, I think it’s even more inspiring/miraculous to accept the explanation that science has (mostly) pieced together. And the exceedingly long slow journey of evolution of life based on DNA’s unique properties of almost-but-not-quite-perfect replication. 3.6 billion years ago prokaryotes. It took 1.6 billion years more (until 2 billion years ago) to get to eukaryotes (cells complex enough to have organelles). And then another 800billion years (until 1.2 billion years ago) to get multi-cellular organisms. It was another billion years until mammals came on the scene (about 0.2 billion years ago). Homo sapiens only appeared 0.003 billion years ago. Modern man 0.0003 billion years ago. The industrial revolution 0.0000003 billion years ago. And you know the story from there, the pace just kept picking up.
And here I am, one of those humans, after an impressive period of advancements before I was born. But for me, ever since I can remember, it was not awe-inspiring to turn the knob on a box with glass in front and see/hear people talking inside there, it was just something that happened. It was not awe inspiring to get into a fabricated hunk of metal (driven by my parents) and travel 60mph, it was just something that happened. It was not awe inspiring to get into a bigger hunk of metal and fly a thousand miles, it was just something that happened.
The computer revolution is something that happened in my lifetime, so I should have more opportunity to be awestruck by that. But every day I hold this worldwide 2-way portal thing in my hand with more computing power than NASA had when they sent a man to the moon, and it’s so routine that it doesn’t strike a hint of awe in my day to day life.
No doubt AI has profound impacts on our lives and we don't see most of them. It is a little more noticeable when they use AI to do something new we can observe directly, like creating a human-sounding conversational bot. If that particular technology became widespread, I'm sure the novelty would fade into the background just like all the other ones.
It is the nature of things that we get accustomed to things and don't pay much attention to the aweseome cuumulative effects of the gradual changes. Just like the frog that never even realizes it’s being boiled (Hopefully we don’t end up the same way!)
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(2B)+(2B)' ?
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