Kevin Simler

I know, there are many perspectives. But again, I think it's clear: humans are the next most important thing. And once again it comes down to learning. Before humans, all cumulative learning took place in genomes. But humans introduced an entirely new modality: culture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Actually, we've seen two further events at which the learning/growth rate increased as much as it did with the first human cultural learning: farming, and industry.

Growth yes, but learning? Information age would be a closer candidate, but genes vs culture is *many* orders of magnitude difference.

Farmers grew 250 times faster than foragers, who grew 150 times faster than did animal brains. So farmer transition bigger by speed up measure.