Leaving this as a WIP comment for now, hopefully will Babble More later:
The big question here is “pre or post-singularity?” and/or “are we talking humans, or posthumans?”
Once you get transhumans with more than 7 working memory slots, and the ability to understand complex coordination schemes, things change pretty radically. Before then, you’re bottle-necked on human cognition. The value of a transaction has to exceed the transaction cost.
Right now, I feel motivated to engage with complicated contracts when a lot of money is at stake (i.e. ownership of startup), but not for stuff coming out of my fun / community budget.
With that in mind, some thoughts so far:
Intelligence augmentation probably counts as a major social technology, in practice. (John’s improved notation idea counts. I don’t know that we’ll see “directly increase intelligence” in the immediate future but I could see it in ~20-30 years.
“Make better use of existing intelligence augmentation” feels ripe. Right now I have access to large monitors, google calendar, Roam, etc. But somehow I don’t feel like I can make full use of them. Much of my information-processing is somehow entwined with social media which is optimized to exploit me. But if I managed to live my life on a Facebook variant that was optimized to make me smarter instead of dumber (even constrained by “also being entertaining”), that’d be super cool. You’d require a critical mass of people using it for that to work
Leaving this as a WIP comment for now, hopefully will Babble More later:
The big question here is “pre or post-singularity?” and/or “are we talking humans, or posthumans?”
Once you get transhumans with more than 7 working memory slots, and the ability to understand complex coordination schemes, things change pretty radically. Before then, you’re bottle-necked on human cognition. The value of a transaction has to exceed the transaction cost.
Right now, I feel motivated to engage with complicated contracts when a lot of money is at stake (i.e. ownership of startup), but not for stuff coming out of my fun / community budget.
With that in mind, some thoughts so far:
Intelligence augmentation probably counts as a major social technology, in practice. (John’s improved notation idea counts. I don’t know that we’ll see “directly increase intelligence” in the immediate future but I could see it in ~20-30 years.
“Make better use of existing intelligence augmentation” feels ripe. Right now I have access to large monitors, google calendar, Roam, etc. But somehow I don’t feel like I can make full use of them. Much of my information-processing is somehow entwined with social media which is optimized to exploit me. But if I managed to live my life on a Facebook variant that was optimized to make me smarter instead of dumber (even constrained by “also being entertaining”), that’d be super cool. You’d require a critical mass of people using it for that to work