this is a deep-sea anglerfish.
if you believe in reincarnation, pray you're not reincarnated as a male deep-sea anglerfish. he spends his days floating alone in the dark abyss of the ocean until finally fulling his purpose - finding and attaching himself to a female, and quite literally, never letting go. over time, he fuses with her, giving up everything but his sperm.
becoming, essentially .. a parasitic testicle. grim.
we'll come back to the angler fish at the end.
exbodiment
in a recent mlst podcast, Prof. David Krakauer, from the Santa Fe Institute explained 'exbodiment'.
If I understand his concept correctly - there is stuff (think tools, symbols, instruments, etc) that exist outside your body and brain, which, almost magically, store and transmit knowledge.
'exbodiment' is the process of interacting with that knowledge.
these artifacts are maintained collectively and play a large role in the 'cultural evolution' of the human species.
examples make this easier to understand.
"no one person built the chessboard. Lots of people did together. and they collectively discovered a very effective representation of a certain kind."
and.
".. we have technologies for everything that we're bad at. We don't play tennis well with our hand. People do, but it's not quite as exciting as watching Roger Federer .. We don't calculate well, hence calculators"
in a sense, 'embodied artifacts' are a way for us to tap-into (and contribute toward) the immortal, collective, accumulated intelligence of the human species.
"So I actually think you could argue that evolution itself as a process has moved from more mortal styles of computing and I mean information processing in the organic setting um to more immortal like things"
map versus GPS
a 'map' is an exbodied artifact.
i can review a collectively created map of Paris, internalise that map, and then navigate freely through the city.
or, I can outsource completely to google maps on my iphone.
if my goal is to get from a to b, the gps is way more efficient. there's no reason for me to acquire the skill of reading a map. but there is a tradeoff; there are always tradeoffs - think of calculators or spell-check.
i'm short-circuiting skill acquisition - wayfinding, mental mapping, estimation and grammar intuition for convenience.
how to not become a parasitic floating testicle
there is a disturbingly plausible near future in which language models turn us all into parasitic floating testicles.
unlike a gps or a calculator which can short circuit skill-acquisition within a narrow domain, language models cover an increasingly large surface area, abstracting away the need to acquire many meta skills.
the more optimistic path of 'empowered externalisation' is also possible - the tennis racquet empowers Roger, just as has the calculator does for Terence Tao.
Unfortunately, incentives along the path to atrophying outsourcing are strong.
it's going to be a generational battle - re-aligning values to ensure we use these increasingly intelligent tools as 'exbodied' artifacts to evolve humanity, rather than blindly outsourcing until we all become the deep-sea testicle.