Elf Sternberg

Dan Ashwood's video, Repeat Viewings, begins:

For most, the death of scarcity and involuntary mortality is a welcome development. For some, however, nostalgia and the allure of the material universe prove too strong.

They are doomed to relive their pasts. This is the story of one such case.

I won't ruin it for you. It's only 12 minutes long, and it's an example of what Nick Bostrom calls "The Simulation Menace." It's also surprisingly poignant.

One of the less important points in my post entitled Intelligent Design and The Legend of the Lone Scientist is that scientific research these days involves thinking about things in such a broad manner that it takes more than one head to get headaround on any given project. While there have been a number of recent research projects that have been done by one man, they're projects that are done at the one-man scale, and most of the ones I can think of are in zoology or taxonomy. Anything deeper and you're talking teams.

But teams are by definition wasteful. There's an upper bound to how much input the core thought of a team can be distributed among its members, and how useful adding additional people to the team can be. Ultimately, you end up with a circumstance in which more people make for less meaningful work; they become a drag on the system as their ideas require more winnowing to reach the really good ones.

We have effectively tapped out the ideas within reach of a single mind; we are now researching the ideas that are within reach of a team of human beings. We have added tools to improve filtration, winnowing, and so forth: wikis, fora, email, and so forth allow teams to improve their responsiveness and capabilities, but there's only so much that these extensions to hands, eyes, and voices can do.

We're eventually going to face problems that require so much thought that either the machines will do it and we'll just try to understand what they came up with, or we'll become part of the machine and use its storage and automation all the more efficiently. One of the reasons for the hyberbolic growth curve in knowledge has been the growth of knowledge management, from oral histories to written words to indexed libraries to digital collections, wikis, and search engines. There is a limit, however, to even what a team can accomplish with these tools, limits imposed by the borders of flesh. Either we will hit those limits and stop, or we will penetrate those borders and become hive.