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Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

(news.asu.edu)
273 points geox | 6 comments | 17 Jun 24 21:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.83s | source | bottom
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johnnylambada ◴[18 Jun 24 02:27 UTC] No.40713507[source]▶
It’s fascinating to think about the number of PUs (procedural units) it takes to make a modern tool. Something as simple as a modern hammer must number in the thousands and a mobile phone in the millions or billions.
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1. levocardia ◴[18 Jun 24 04:01 UTC] No.40713950[source]▶
That idea is pretty similar to "assembly theory" no? In the sense of how much information or evolution was necessary to generate some artifact, be it a benzene molecule, a stone tool, or an iphone
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2. visarga ◴[18 Jun 24 05:33 UTC] No.40714354[source]▶
It took humans 300k years, all of us, our collective output to reach this point. Yet people insist on comparing a human who is part of society with a LLM alone, who doesn't even have search, and very limited contexts, just closed book mode remembering.
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3. lifeofguenter ◴[18 Jun 24 05:37 UTC] No.40714368[source]▶
Who is comparing LLM with Humans?

As far as I can tell nobody is.

LLM is a great tool that helps our brains same way a hammer helps our hands.

4. namaria ◴[18 Jun 24 07:47 UTC] No.40715133[source]▶
You seem to be hallucinating a strawman
5. jstanley ◴[18 Jun 24 08:41 UTC] No.40715409[source]▶
Wrong thread, perhaps?
6. adolph ◴[18 Jun 24 11:33 UTC] No.40716517[source]▶
The same came to my mind. I think there may be some elements of assembly which have to do with biological process that don’t apply to “accumulation of technological knowledge,” but I need to reread it.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9

Here, we introduce AT, which addresses these challenges by describing how novelty generation and selection can operate in forward-evolving processes. The framework of AT allows us to predict features of new discoveries during selection, and to quantify how much selection was necessary to produce observed objects, without having to prespecify individuals or units of selection.