In The Before

Smarts are everywhere. We have some of the smartest minds that have ever existed alive right now. I mean, if you threw them out in the woods, they would probably die of thirst, but that is true of the majority of us. Some of us are so smart that they invented a program that shares everyone else’s smarts with the rest of us. Like they had excess smarts and were just like, “Here, I am not using this.”

Everyone is smarter than our ancestors, but there is something that most people are not. I watch it unfold in a way that does baffle the less successful. There is this march that is taking place. There have been long marches through institutions, women’s marches, civil rights marches, and marches to grocery stores. This one is the march of an idea. The idea that “human” is relative. That “human” does not mean what it has meant this whole time.

When our ancestors invented the spear, they stopped running as fast. When they invented the bow, they got very good at shooting and less good at stalking. When we invented the car, we lost our ability to farm horses in the common sense. When we invented the internet, we stopped knowing things and started looking them up. With the advent of LLMs, we have stopped conversing with ourselves and started conversing with the homunculus.

Meanwhile, we only see the aftermath in the after, and we always forget this fact in the before.