> I think there is an interesting philosophical overlap between automation and intelligence. On the flip side - there's an interesting hypothesis that the purp

> I think there is an interesting philosophical overlap between automation and intelligence. On the flip side - there's an interesting hypothesis that the purpose of consciousness is to mediate conflicting non-conscious impulses. An example would be falling in the water - you have to mediate the impulse to breath with other conflicting impulses (such as the knowledge that you will drown). So I think consciousness/intelligence helps build skills and push them into the subconscious (thus 'automating' them) and then consciousness has to step in again for edge cases the automation can't (yet) handle. There's some fun discussion on the mediation hypothesis (with some Dune tie-ins) here: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791 https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791