The Human Colossus

An excerpt from the brilliant https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html –

If an individual human’s core motivation is to pass its genes on, which keeps the species going, the forces of macroeconomics make the Human Colossus’s core motivation to create value, which means it tends to want to invent newer and better technology. Every time it does that, it becomes an even better inventor, which means it can invent new stuff even faster.

And around the middle of the 20th century, the Human Colossus began working on its most ambitious invention yet.

The Colossus had figured out a long time ago that the best way to create value was to invent value-creating machines. Machines were better than humans at doing many kinds of work, which generated a flood of new resources that could be put towards value creation. Perhaps even more importantly, machine labor freed up huge portions of human time and energy—i.e. huge portions of the Colossus itself—to focus on innovation. It had already outsourced the work of our arms to factory machines and the work of our legs to driving machines, and it had done so through the power of its brain—now what if, somehow, it could outsource the work of the brain itself to a machine?

Especially given my desire to introduce into the Pursuance System software as much automation and semi-automation as possible, perhaps that is the biggest-picture description I should give of this project – fundamentally, Pursuance is coordinating the Human Colossus.