organisms with which they shared their habitats.” (Source Sapiens by Harari Pg 3). Yes the ability to walk upright and use tools gave prehistoric man some of the abilities that squirrels, monkeys and to a lesser extent even crows enjoy. Yet none of them are queuing in front of me at my local Trader Joe’s. So what happened?
According to this Tel Aviv brainiac, 70,000 years ago a Cognitive Revolution occurred. Humans got better and better at using language to make shit up. ““Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths… . Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.” (Source Sapiens by Dr. Harari Pg 25). Humans mastered the ability to flexibly cooperate on a massive scale. And what scale is more massive then a web that connects the entire world?
What we’re talking about here are networks of networks a.k.a. bunches of humans strung together. Do you really think that over 100 years ago scientists cracked how the brain works to the point that they could send electrical impulses into it, and have them translate into actual experiences? Sounds like the Matrix? Nope, it’s called an electric hearing aide, and people were using them before cars were even invented.
Doctors realized that they didn’t need to figure out how the brain works. Our organic network was already brilliant at hacking patterns – otherwise we would’ve gone the way of the Dodo bird. All that hearing aide needed to do was be consistent in the pattern of information it was sending. Our brains would do the decoding.
Doctors realized that they didn’t need to figure out how the brain works. Our organic network was already brilliant at hacking patterns – otherwise we would’ve gone the way of the Dodo bird.
So when Sean Elles and Morgan Brown make statements like “The companies that grow the fastest are the ones that learn the fastest” they are talking about breaking into that cerebral programming. You don’t consciously understand it. But “it” is the force behind a lot of the decisions that you make.
Yet surely a smart person won’t fall for some digital marketing bullshit? Take Gary Kasparov, Russian chess grandmaster and tactical genius. After losing to IBM’s Deep Blue computer program, he created “Advanced Chess.” Kasparov combined humans and computers into teams, and had them compete against other human computer teams. The first free-style chess tournament held in 2005 produced a revelation. Teams of chess grandmasters and their computers were getting beaten by amateur American chess players with 3 ordinary P.C.s. “Their skill in effectively coaching their machines counteracted the superior chess knowledge of their grandmaster opponents and the superior computational power of the grandmaster’s machines.” (Source Kasparov Ted 2017 Lecture “Don’t fear the intelligent machines. Work with them”). Kasparov created the following formula:
(Weak Player + Weak Machine + Strong Process) > (Strong Player + Strong Machine + Inferior Process)