Suppose you're telling the history of the entire universe, from the Big Bang until today, and you can choose to highlight only ONE event. One major before/after moment. What would it be?
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Yes, brains can learn, and brains existed before humans. But brains die with their hosts, and all their hard-won knowledge has to be re-learned from scratch by the next generation.
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Some animals pass knowledge from parents to children. But the carrying capacity of this "culture" is small and fixed. Humans were the first species with the ability to ACCUMULATE knowledge in culture, in an open-ended way.
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So, again, our story: Big Bang. 10 billion years of boredom. Then life! And 4 billion years of natural selection. Then brains+culture! And a ~million years of cultural evolution later, with all of our farms and factories and computing devices, here we are.
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If this view of history has merit, it suggests that the next truly transformative step will involve a new modality for cumulative learning. Is this AI? Machine learning? The answer is "definitely maybe." But we're certainly not there yet.
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AI systems of today are like the brains of early animals. They're capable of some cool feats of learning, but there's nothing cumulative about them. They're built, they learn a few things, and then they dead-end. Where feedback loops exist, they all pass through human culture.
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The big thing to watch for, then, are AI systems capable of self-sustaining knowledge accumulation. An open-ended machine culture. It's a ways off — but it's coming, and it's very important.
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