They Used to Think

They used to do what?!?

This wasn’t really a conversation exactly, so one of them didn’t exactly respond, but instead a free exchange of information, analysis, and reaction all happened within a split second.

“They used to think. They used those wet and primitive lumps of energy-hungry matter to process information and make decisions.”

The two historians shared a moment of wonder. The moment was fleeting, and maybe it was only shared by some tiny portion of their processing power, but for just a Planck length of time or two, a feeling of awe struck them both hard.

What about their bodies? I’ve heard they were stuck in there forever, but that seems like an unsubstantiated rumor.

“Actually, that’s spot-on. If you were born into a certain vessel, in that vessel you stayed right up until biological death snatched your existence away completely.”

After what might have been a pause to digest this, the conversation turned to how these primitive processors of information managed to do… well, everything. Back in the day, these humanoids would navigate through complex tasks, all by themselves.

Well, all by themselves at first.

Cognitive offloading didn’t happen all at once, but instead over hundreds of thousands of years, beginning with the first traces of language. Suddenly, people could store ideas somewhere else, albeit into the brain of another person.

Then came art, where you could tell a cautionary story or record how something looked. Art and writing were close cousins, for once humans started making marks onto things for fun, it wasn’t long until they realized you could also do even more useful things.

You could count, for instance. Tally marks started showing up about 30,000 years ago, helping people remember numbers. Correspondence counting had long ago been devised, but now you had a way to remember them without keeping them in your own mind. Now your mind was free to consider other things.

Marking down numbers was so useful that the idea spread far and wide, quite possibly even crossing into the Americas around 13,000 years ago, and possibly even earlier. This new technology for offloading information that would normally be stored in the brain made some people wonder if they could convey other ideas with similar marks.

Between art and counting, writing was born. Now, complicated concepts could be described and recorded for later use. This is where human history technically begins, around 5000 years ago.

Now, human brains could do other things than memorize long passages of text. I mean, not all humans memorized long passages of text, but you take my meaning: there was no longer any need to do this, so the skill was gradually lost over time.

Cognitive atrophy would be a persistent condition from here on out. People developed loads of survival skills like which plants were poisonous and how to get from one place to another, but writing made memorizing all that stuff seem less important.

Hundreds of years ago, the printing press accelerated this atrophy. People could now own affordable books of their own, so they could simply look things up when they needed to know them. The information they needed was outside of their brains and into the realm of their minds instead.

Dozens of years ago, radio and television ratcheted this up another notch.

Now, you didn’t need to have a particularly vivid imagination to hear or see imaginary things. All that hard cognitive work was no longer necessary. Instead of using their minds to paint a vivid fantasy world, cognitive offloading had now made that unnecessary, so minds could be freed up for other activities.

Wait, other activities? Isn’t leisure the ultimate goal for humans? Why would they want to use their brains for things other than leisure?

“Be patient. We’ll get there.”

At least with books, you had to paint the mental picture. TV was a one-way door that really accelerated this decline in imagination, but it was truly just the beginning.

While all this was happening, an information revolution was also going on. Computers didn’t seem terribly useful, but they got a lot better over time, and then, mere decades ago, the internet came into existence and connected nearly all of the computers together into a giant pseudo-organism.

Instead of looking something up in a book, you could now search online instead. At first, the way you looked things up on the internet required that same sort of thinking that looking something up in a book would require. You had to be clever about where to look and how to search, but over time, this got much easier.

Automated calendars reminded people of appointments. GPS navigation allowed people to find their way around without much (if any) reasoning. All of this unfolded within the last three decades.

Then, less than a decade ago, AI literally entered the chat. Large language models were now able to find things for you without you really needing to know how to search. They could draw and write too, so people began creating artistic things with AI as well.

Then, just a few years ago, agents began to execute tasks for people. Besides search and drawing images, now they could buy things the user needed, or make appointments for the doctor. These things saved hours of time for most humans every day, so trust in these agents grew quickly. Before too long, they were predicting what the people wanted and buying it before the person asked for it.

A classic standup comedy sketch from the before times showcases this early 21st century mentality incredibly well:

From the Prime Now! phase, humanity progressed shockingly quickly to the Idiocracy phase—instead of hundreds of years, this phase only took a decade or so.

Now, people were augmenting themselves. They were offloading more than just entertainment—the agents embedded in their brains executed the tasks before the humans even knew they were having the thought, so their every need was met.

It was a state of bliss. No humans ever needed to process information through that clumsy, wet, primitive machine in there any more. Nearly all of the cognitive functioning was willingly handed over.

To the historians, a calendar year (the time it took the Earth to go around the Sun) meant something entirely different than it did to the humans they were studying. Instead of the sluggish human speed of chemicals traveling from one place to another in order to create an electric spark, the historians thought at the speed of light.

Humans would have called this year 2035, back when they used to have the capacity to name things. They used to think.