François CholletVerified account

Not sure the internet is a cognitive revolution like language and writing were.

Pictures and recordings are in the same league with language and writing in my opinion. Also think writing is a recording of the language to be played later in time.

The ability to compute has been around for thousands of years.

How do you know computing will turn out to be a key development on par with language and writing? It might end up being on par with just a fancier way of printing.

I would also add printing press to this list. Invention of which has made the widespread knowledge possible which was otherwise only limited to elites.

Well, printing presses were quite a major corollary, precursor to the whole current (~ 500 ys) knowledge & tech explosion, with not much happening over prior millenia. I’m not sure we’ve seen such corollary in computation yet, it rather feels like corollary to printing presses.

Most writing on the internet isn’t really computable at the moment. We still have to solve “computable universal representation of knowledge”. There are some advances, but nothing open and widely distributed. The big paradigm shift is yet to happen.

However, we are also living in times where two key achievements of civilization are at risk: democracy and peace. The Internet was often considered to promote both. I wonder whether the opposite might be the case.

This technology boom feels a lot more powerful to come than previous one. Last one has been focused on improvements - this one is focused on disruption and crucial changes in consciousness of humanity. We are occupied by a strange, cheerful feeling of something new constantly