5 ms·

Is it just me, or does anyone else see not buy into the idea that the Internet is something that's dramatically altering the course of human evolution? The aut

Is it just me, or does anyone else see not buy into the idea that the Internet is something that's dramatically altering the course of human evolution? The author seems to think that with so many people being online that humans are evolving into something else and thus the way our society organizes itself is also due for a dramatic change. Personally I don't see things that way, instead I just see the Internet as a logical progression of our communication tools. It's existence, to me, doesn't mean anything more than it makes human's true nature more apparent.

danielweber 13y ago
Cooking altered human DNA, so it's possible for societal changes to show up in genes. OTOH, that was 10,000 years ago, and it takes many many generations for it to happen.
- return0 13y ago
  In our times, it takes only an ethical decision to start producing artificially 'evolved' humans.
mseebach 13y ago
Evolution, no, society, yes. New means of communications change the dynamics of how groups and alliances are formed which shapes dissent. The internet has radically lowered the cost of friction of communication and coordination in all but the smallest groups - in that it shares a lot with the printing press which did much the same thing for printed material.
vbuterin 13y ago
It's not that humans are evolving into something else, it's that the internet dramatically reduces communication costs and allows for levels of cohesion not seen since the village days, except on a global scale. If you try to deeply understand economics (any school), one thing that comes out again and again is that low information is in some sense the root of all evil. This can even be described formally: > Theorem: given perfect information and zero communication cost, any reasonable decision-making method must produce a Pareto-optimal outcome (ie. one that cannot strictly be improved upon). > Proof: suppose otherwise. This means that the decision-making method in question produced outcome X, where outcome Y would have been possible, preferable to at least one person and unpreferable to no one. By the perfect information criterion, everyone should have realized that this would have happened, and by the zero communication cost criterion everyone would have come together and agreed to produce outcome Y instead. Thus, outcome X cannot have happened. Note that the above applies to markets, democracy, Reddit-style karma systems and any other mechanism where every individual has nonzero power (so, maybe not pure dictatorships). And the further we fall from this perfect information / zero communication cost ideal, the more all of the various social problems we are familiar with today arise. Centralized systems tend to historically emerge in low-information environments, as otherwise it's too easy for people to come together and realize that it would be more efficient for them to cut out the middleman. The internet is inherently much more decentralized than the communication media of the 20th century, under which only a few select parties could be broadcasters and everyone else is a passive consumer. Thus, it massively broadens the solution space for methods of decision-making, allowing for the growth of mechanisms that do not rely on central authorities. This is the fundamental insight of so-called "cyber-libertarianism", and applies to governments, large corporations, schools and even families.
- pachydermic 13y ago
  What? Your theorem doesn't even match with the basic prisoner's dilemma. True, in the classic version of this game there's no communication... but the point is the same - just because an outcome is Pareto efficient doesn't mean that it's a stable equilibrium - people's rational self interest can result in worse outcomes. I don't know what kind of economics you're talking about. Most of the absurd simplifying assumptions really have to do with the idea that people have perfect foresight and their statistical guesses are unbiased - and that we perfectly understand variance/risk and all that jazz. It doesn't have as much to do with how we communicate with one another, rather that we are super awesome flawless statistical machines when in reality we all suck at statistics (have all kinds of biases and heuristics to rely on) in every day life. And just because information is cheaper doesn't mean it's free. At the very least it costs us time - at least in the current form of the internet it's not like there's simultaneous, effortless, instant communication between every human being on Earth. Now that might change things. But I don't think you fully made the case that the internet is fundamentally different than a "better" or more effective printing press. My point, I guess, is that maybe we approach that zero cost world, but will never reach it. And that there's a fundamental distinction between being at zero cost and being at any positive cost... so that the internet is more like a printing press rather than a zero cost communication mechanism.
  - ewzimm 13y ago
    Users are the most important part of any information processing system, and any Pareto-optimal communication configuration requires that perfection extend to the users and their decision-making process. You could model this with the Prisoner's Dilemma by playing it this way: in your system of perfect communication, both players can know each other's decision before they commit and both can respond to any change in the other player's position. This would lead to always choosing the mutually beneficial position. Any change to the rules would make at least one individual worse off because they would lose information. This situation requires that both players give up the freedom to conceal their decision from the other. Privacy is at odds with optimal communication. In the move toward perfect communication, there will be changes that damage the positions and advantages of people involved in the system. It's clear that existing power differences are enhanced by rapid growth. Although perfection might not be a reachable goal, I believe there's evidence that approaching it will lead to a massive long-term benefit for everyone involved. There's no other way to overcome the mistakes we all make by being constantly misinformed.
fburnaby 13y ago
Hmm. I might be a "the internet is altering the course of human evolution" person. But it depends on what you mean by "the course of human evolution". Do you mean "human evolution" in the typical biological sense, like talking about our genes and our physiology? Or something broader? I'm pretty convinced that using the Internet has somewhat (not necessarily dramatically, but somewhat) already altered how I think about the world an dhow I see it. Certainly it has altered how I behave and spend much of my time. It also has clearly altered (I'd say dramatically) how we communicate, who we communicate with, and thus also who we consider to be part of our "in-group" (I'm thinking about Peter Singer's expanding circle). That has a huge impact on our moral attitudes, even. Very central changes to what we're like. Some people (I think rightly) consider this to be an evolution, in the broad systems sense of the word. As for actual biological evolution, I guess that's less obvious to me. But it sure doesn't seem impossible. Yes, the beginning of the Internet is in some sense a consequence of our nature, not a cause. But now that it's here, it can interact with us; it is part of our environment, and could affect our biology. This idea isn't strange to ecologists, who typically refer to it as "top-down" forcing. So my attitude to this is that, no, the existence of the Internet doesn't only "make our true nature more apparent". Or rather, it makes our true nature apparent in the same way that the elongated shape of some flowers illustrates the nature of hummingbirds (http://www.rubythroat.org/Article860629.html http://www.rubythroat.org/Article860629.html). From that article: "It's obvious that a hummingbird's long narrow beak is an adaptation for feeding on long narrow flowers, but the corollary is also true: There are species of tube-shaped flowers that are adapted for being pollinated by organisms with skinny, tapered mouthparts." I want to say something similar: "Yes, there is an ecological relationship between us and the Internet, and thus the Internet reflects our natures, but it's also its own thing, a part of our environments, alongside which we should expect to evolve." One interesting advocate of this view is the science historian George Dyson, if you're interested in exploring the idea more.
rayiner 13y ago
I'm in total concurrence with you. I think the major advance was the telegraph or maybe the telephone. Reducing communications latency from 3-5 days to milliseconds. Technology is great, but people dramatically overestimate how much impact it has on social organization. Look at cities. Cities are the archetypal expression of civilization. How long have cities been built in more or less the same way? They have been recognizably modern for a century (people were coming down from Westchester to work in midtown Manhattan on electric trains 100 years ago), and have been structurally similar for hundreds if not thousands of years. People were sitting around complaining about taxes and oligarchs during the Roman Republic 2500 years ago.
- FBT 13y ago
  While you make a solid point, I will point out that the newest, hottest technology can make a difference, as in this very case. Silk Road was something new, and different from anything one could do with a telegraph or telephone. For the first time in history, (a part of) cyberspace was a effectivly a independent country, effectivly a country of it's own, not bound by any lawmakers whatsoever. It was true anarchy, the kind libertarians dream of, and it worked. The medium of the internet allowed it to run in that fashion, and still be a civil place. For the first time ever, Hobbes was wrong. In the state of nature as it is on the internet life is not nasty, brutish, and short. No one died in horrible fighting and murder on Silk Road, unlike in unregulated areas in real life. (Such as real-world drug dealers.)
  - rayiner 13y ago
    > Silk Road was something new, and different from anything one could do with a telegraph or telephone. I fail to see how Silk Road was anything other than a way to buy and sell goods, something that has been done via telegraph and telephone and other communications mediums for centuries. > For the first time in history, (a part of) cyberspace was a effectivly a independent country, effectivly a country of it's own, not bound by any lawmakers whatsoever. It wasn't anything of the sort. All of the costs and benefits of Silk Road were externalized to the offline world. It was less like an "independent country" than even say Hacker News, where the online interaction is valuable on its own merits. Silk Road was in contrast not valuable on its own merits, but just a way to exchange things of value in the real world (drugs and money). More to the point, while I don't agree that drug laws are a good idea, I can see what motivated the legislation. Drug use isn't cost-free. It's not just high-functioning professionals using a little pot on the weekends. It is that, but it's also addicted pregnant women and mothers injuring their babies. It's addicted fathers unable to provide for their families. It's rural communities ripped apart by addiction. The fact that the cost of the drug war may be worse than the costs of drug use does not mean that there are no costs to drug use. You can't accidentally step on a used syringe on a city street and fail to see what might motivate people to outlaw the use of drugs. That's where the "independent country" analogy totally falls down. A country must deal with the ramifications of its policies, good and bad. Texas chooses to let oil and chemical companies operate relatively freely within its borders, and it enjoys the economic benefits of that and suffers the environmental and health consequences of that. But on Silk Road, all of the costs of those illegal products sold on the site were not felt internally. They were externalized to the real world. It's easy to construct a utopia when all of the consequences happen elsewhere.
Sagat 13y ago
I don't buy into it because most people don't use it for truly ground breaking projects, but rather as a social themed timewaster. They remain in their small communities (now more of a friends list) and don't "evolve" into a new being or anything like that. Just the old deal with faster ways of communicating.
hershel 13y ago
One view of history(and evolution) is that progress enables cooperation at a larger scale: from single cells, to multi-cell organisms, to tribes, to cities and to states, and that those abilities radically change how the world looks. The internet has defently been a big step in larger(and higher quality) collaborations, so it makes sense it would radically change how the world looks.

danielweber 13y ago

Cooking altered human DNA, so it's possible for societal changes to show up in genes. OTOH, that was 10,000 years ago, and it takes many many generations for it to happen.

return0 13y ago
In our times, it takes only an ethical decision to start producing artificially 'evolved' humans.

mseebach 13y ago

Evolution, no, society, yes. New means of communications change the dynamics of how groups and alliances are formed which shapes dissent. The internet has radically lowered the cost of friction of communication and coordination in all but the smallest groups - in that it shares a lot with the printing press which did much the same thing for printed material.

vbuterin 13y ago

It's not that humans are evolving into something else, it's that the internet dramatically reduces communication costs and allows for levels of cohesion not seen since the village days, except on a global scale. If you try to deeply understand economics (any school), one thing that comes out again and again is that low information is in some sense the root of all evil. This can even be described formally: > Theorem: given perfect information and zero communication cost, any reasonable decision-making method must produce a Pareto-optimal outcome (ie. one that cannot strictly be improved upon). > Proof: suppose otherwise. This means that the decision-making method in question produced outcome X, where outcome Y would have been possible, preferable to at least one person and unpreferable to no one. By the perfect information criterion, everyone should have realized that this would have happened, and by the zero communication cost criterion everyone would have come together and agreed to produce outcome Y instead. Thus, outcome X cannot have happened. Note that the above applies to markets, democracy, Reddit-style karma systems and any other mechanism where every individual has nonzero power (so, maybe not pure dictatorships). And the further we fall from this perfect information / zero communication cost ideal, the more all of the various social problems we are familiar with today arise. Centralized systems tend to historically emerge in low-information environments, as otherwise it's too easy for people to come together and realize that it would be more efficient for them to cut out the middleman. The internet is inherently much more decentralized than the communication media of the 20th century, under which only a few select parties could be broadcasters and everyone else is a passive consumer. Thus, it massively broadens the solution space for methods of decision-making, allowing for the growth of mechanisms that do not rely on central authorities. This is the fundamental insight of so-called "cyber-libertarianism", and applies to governments, large corporations, schools and even families.

pachydermic 13y ago
What? Your theorem doesn't even match with the basic prisoner's dilemma. True, in the classic version of this game there's no communication... but the point is the same - just because an outcome is Pareto efficient doesn't mean that it's a stable equilibrium - people's rational self interest can result in worse outcomes. I don't know what kind of economics you're talking about. Most of the absurd simplifying assumptions really have to do with the idea that people have perfect foresight and their statistical guesses are unbiased - and that we perfectly understand variance/risk and all that jazz. It doesn't have as much to do with how we communicate with one another, rather that we are super awesome flawless statistical machines when in reality we all suck at statistics (have all kinds of biases and heuristics to rely on) in every day life. And just because information is cheaper doesn't mean it's free. At the very least it costs us time - at least in the current form of the internet it's not like there's simultaneous, effortless, instant communication between every human being on Earth. Now that might change things. But I don't think you fully made the case that the internet is fundamentally different than a "better" or more effective printing press. My point, I guess, is that maybe we approach that zero cost world, but will never reach it. And that there's a fundamental distinction between being at zero cost and being at any positive cost... so that the internet is more like a printing press rather than a zero cost communication mechanism.
- ewzimm 13y ago
  Users are the most important part of any information processing system, and any Pareto-optimal communication configuration requires that perfection extend to the users and their decision-making process. You could model this with the Prisoner's Dilemma by playing it this way: in your system of perfect communication, both players can know each other's decision before they commit and both can respond to any change in the other player's position. This would lead to always choosing the mutually beneficial position. Any change to the rules would make at least one individual worse off because they would lose information. This situation requires that both players give up the freedom to conceal their decision from the other. Privacy is at odds with optimal communication. In the move toward perfect communication, there will be changes that damage the positions and advantages of people involved in the system. It's clear that existing power differences are enhanced by rapid growth. Although perfection might not be a reachable goal, I believe there's evidence that approaching it will lead to a massive long-term benefit for everyone involved. There's no other way to overcome the mistakes we all make by being constantly misinformed.

fburnaby 13y ago

Hmm. I might be a "the internet is altering the course of human evolution" person. But it depends on what you mean by "the course of human evolution". Do you mean "human evolution" in the typical biological sense, like talking about our genes and our physiology? Or something broader? I'm pretty convinced that using the Internet has somewhat (not necessarily dramatically, but somewhat) already altered how I think about the world an dhow I see it. Certainly it has altered how I behave and spend much of my time. It also has clearly altered (I'd say dramatically) how we communicate, who we communicate with, and thus also who we consider to be part of our "in-group" (I'm thinking about Peter Singer's expanding circle). That has a huge impact on our moral attitudes, even. Very central changes to what we're like. Some people (I think rightly) consider this to be an evolution, in the broad systems sense of the word. As for actual biological evolution, I guess that's less obvious to me. But it sure doesn't seem impossible. Yes, the beginning of the Internet is in some sense a consequence of our nature, not a cause. But now that it's here, it can interact with us; it is part of our environment, and could affect our biology. This idea isn't strange to ecologists, who typically refer to it as "top-down" forcing. So my attitude to this is that, no, the existence of the Internet doesn't only "make our true nature more apparent". Or rather, it makes our true nature apparent in the same way that the elongated shape of some flowers illustrates the nature of hummingbirds (http://www.rubythroat.org/Article860629.html http://www.rubythroat.org/Article860629.html). From that article: "It's obvious that a hummingbird's long narrow beak is an adaptation for feeding on long narrow flowers, but the corollary is also true: There are species of tube-shaped flowers that are adapted for being pollinated by organisms with skinny, tapered mouthparts." I want to say something similar: "Yes, there is an ecological relationship between us and the Internet, and thus the Internet reflects our natures, but it's also its own thing, a part of our environments, alongside which we should expect to evolve." One interesting advocate of this view is the science historian George Dyson, if you're interested in exploring the idea more.

rayiner 13y ago

I'm in total concurrence with you. I think the major advance was the telegraph or maybe the telephone. Reducing communications latency from 3-5 days to milliseconds. Technology is great, but people dramatically overestimate how much impact it has on social organization. Look at cities. Cities are the archetypal expression of civilization. How long have cities been built in more or less the same way? They have been recognizably modern for a century (people were coming down from Westchester to work in midtown Manhattan on electric trains 100 years ago), and have been structurally similar for hundreds if not thousands of years. People were sitting around complaining about taxes and oligarchs during the Roman Republic 2500 years ago.

FBT 13y ago
While you make a solid point, I will point out that the newest, hottest technology can make a difference, as in this very case. Silk Road was something new, and different from anything one could do with a telegraph or telephone. For the first time in history, (a part of) cyberspace was a effectivly a independent country, effectivly a country of it's own, not bound by any lawmakers whatsoever. It was true anarchy, the kind libertarians dream of, and it worked. The medium of the internet allowed it to run in that fashion, and still be a civil place. For the first time ever, Hobbes was wrong. In the state of nature as it is on the internet life is not nasty, brutish, and short. No one died in horrible fighting and murder on Silk Road, unlike in unregulated areas in real life. (Such as real-world drug dealers.)
- rayiner 13y ago
  > Silk Road was something new, and different from anything one could do with a telegraph or telephone. I fail to see how Silk Road was anything other than a way to buy and sell goods, something that has been done via telegraph and telephone and other communications mediums for centuries. > For the first time in history, (a part of) cyberspace was a effectivly a independent country, effectivly a country of it's own, not bound by any lawmakers whatsoever. It wasn't anything of the sort. All of the costs and benefits of Silk Road were externalized to the offline world. It was less like an "independent country" than even say Hacker News, where the online interaction is valuable on its own merits. Silk Road was in contrast not valuable on its own merits, but just a way to exchange things of value in the real world (drugs and money). More to the point, while I don't agree that drug laws are a good idea, I can see what motivated the legislation. Drug use isn't cost-free. It's not just high-functioning professionals using a little pot on the weekends. It is that, but it's also addicted pregnant women and mothers injuring their babies. It's addicted fathers unable to provide for their families. It's rural communities ripped apart by addiction. The fact that the cost of the drug war may be worse than the costs of drug use does not mean that there are no costs to drug use. You can't accidentally step on a used syringe on a city street and fail to see what might motivate people to outlaw the use of drugs. That's where the "independent country" analogy totally falls down. A country must deal with the ramifications of its policies, good and bad. Texas chooses to let oil and chemical companies operate relatively freely within its borders, and it enjoys the economic benefits of that and suffers the environmental and health consequences of that. But on Silk Road, all of the costs of those illegal products sold on the site were not felt internally. They were externalized to the real world. It's easy to construct a utopia when all of the consequences happen elsewhere.

Sagat 13y ago

I don't buy into it because most people don't use it for truly ground breaking projects, but rather as a social themed timewaster. They remain in their small communities (now more of a friends list) and don't "evolve" into a new being or anything like that. Just the old deal with faster ways of communicating.

hershel 13y ago

One view of history(and evolution) is that progress enables cooperation at a larger scale: from single cells, to multi-cell organisms, to tribes, to cities and to states, and that those abilities radically change how the world looks. The internet has defently been a big step in larger(and higher quality) collaborations, so it makes sense it would radically change how the world looks.