We rely on calendars to remember appointments, contact lists to remember phone numbers, GPS systems to navigate, search engines to retrieve information, and notes to preserve ideas we would otherwise forget. It’s hard not to notice how much cognition we have already externalized, both collectively and individually. By externalizing cognition, I mean something similar to the phenomenon discussed in the Extended Mind thesis by Andy Clark and David Chalmers. In many cases, we no longer remember the information itself. We remember where to find it. What interests me is where AI leads as a continuation of this process. Previous cognitive tools primarily externalized information and memory. AI seems to be doing something different. It can help organize ideas and participate in reasoning itself. I wonder how future generations will look back on this. If the last few centuries were largely about externalizing information, could the next century be about externalizing aspects of understanding and preserving them as persistent context? submitted by /u/Boris_Ljevar
Originally posted by u/Boris_Ljevar on r/ArtificialInteligence