A few million years ago, the brain size of our early ancestors, Australopithecus, was approximately 400 cubic centimeters, comparable to the size of a newborn baby’s brain today. 400,000 years ago, the brain size of Homo Heidelbergensis, which transitioned us from hominin to homo, reached 1,200 cubic centimeters. It was approximately the same as the brain size humans have today, and 70,000 years ago, it grew to around 1,300 cubic centimeters, which is the average brain size today.
Our social groups were key to our lineage’s survival. The cognitive demands that stem from the complexity of socialization have begun to evolve our brains, requiring more advanced intellectual formulation and capacity.
The cooperation with others has given us a more predictable and richer diet. The overworked and energy-demanding brain was able to get the nutrients it needed for growth from the increase in animal proteins and fats. Our intellectual capacity always was and always will be energy dependent.
We, as humans, have always judged our evolution by intelligence. What were the previous civilizations capable of doing and when? When did we start to plan, communicate, develop, and pass on knowledge? The question is, how will our future look, civilization-wise?
We went from pointing and gestures to sounds and drawing, and even invented language as a means to transfer knowledge. Each one transferred knowledge at a greater speed and to more people. Writing and reading, which our brain still hasn’t specifically evolved for, solved the problem of transmitting and recording knowledge without direct contact.
Over the last 40 years, with the advent of computers and the internet, humans have largely overcome the previously underappreciated challenge of decentralizing knowledge and learning to everyone. Anyone born today has access to a greater amount of accumulated knowledge than anyone else born before them in human history.
In the past, we developed tools to leverage our abilities; now we are developing tools to leverage our knowledge from which new possibilities will emerge. Access and the automatic storage of knowledge are solved; using it and growing it are the next challenges, and perhaps a race for survival.
We are at a pivotal moment where we are outsourcing our intelligence. The next stage of inventiveness comes from speed and storage. Our peak intelligence is data center scale and chip technology dependent. Reliable and ever-growing electrical generation is today’s equivalent of animal fats and proteins required for our intellectual growth.
The differentiation between countries and what they will achieve will be computationally dependent. Countries that lead the intelligence revolution will dictate the trajectory of entire industries worldwide. Countries that will be left behind will experience obsolescence.
Human history and survival were dependent on the invention of tools to outcompete others. Societies perished and went extinct because they were unable to adapt to the general-purpose technological revolutions.
Fire, the wheel, bronze to iron, gunpowder, maritime navigation, printing press, steam engine, and so forth. Each one generated greater advantages and power while taking down those who couldn’t adapt. Hittites, Mycenaeans, and the Ottoman Empire are examples. Progress is disruptive in every sense of the word.
Industrialization took centuries to unfold. Artificial Intelligence has a less forgiving adoption curve than previous revolutions. Besides moving much faster, it also has an incredibly high barrier to entry and demands extensive infrastructure. However, it is the decisive technological moment of our age.
Countries that can’t innovate and get in the way of their own progress will be outgunned by countries that will innovate and push for computation at scale at all costs. The perceived brutality that other countries, like China, are willing to execute to be a frontrunner for tomorrow can’t be outcompeted with virtue signaling in the West.
Nations that fail to secure access to large-scale computational resources will suffer a knowledge deficit. AI and quantum computing will drive GDP growth through manufacturing efficiencies, automation, increased speed, and new scientific discoveries.
Productivity enhancement will disproportionately accrue to nations that embed machine learning, robotics, and predictive analytics into core industries. Onshoring back industries will be an advantage as low-cost labour will become irrelevant facing low-cost automated robotic manufacturing.
Global production networks will be disrupted, devastating countries whose key advantage is cheap human labour. Including internal inefficient human labour. That’s why I think the overall tariff war is a waste of time, and besides that, it is missing key targets for actual tipping of the scales.
Dependence on foreign technologies will create subservience to the intelligence ‘haves’ who will generate even more disruptive technologies, giving them disproportionate power. We are seeing modern glimpses of this with Donald Trump able to get other countries to drop bad policies facing America’s companies. This is a new form of dominance over sovereignty that will require no bullets.
Monopolizing AI advancement is, should be, a moral dilemma between competitive advancement and future instability. The world will have to decide how this concentration of power can be shared with others before it becomes too powerful.
The hope is that absolute power won’t corrupt, this time, and collaborative governance will take place. Even the haves countries will have the risk of economic exclusion internally in the same way the analog have-not societies, which will be impacted by multipliers for inequality.
Just like the untouched tribes of today, Sentinelese, Mashco Piro, and Yanomami, are being somewhat protected and not acted upon, our morality will have to be extended to the societies that more or less will join their ranks.
Each country individually will have to make strategic decisions on how to best evolve with this technological disruption; schooling, immigration, etc, and collectively before too many join the sands of time. Disruption is coming, and we better be ready.