00:12
Hello, once again, Asami.
I feel like our listeners should just get used to our conversation becoming like a three-parter on a regular basis.
What do you mean? We're not that predictable.
That aside, as it often does, the conversation we had in a previous episode has prompted me to think about this.
Towards the end of the last episode, you mentioned about how the tools we're given shape the way we think about things.
And there's no better or worse way of thinking. It just does influence our thinking.
Yeah.
So that was interesting.
But we, also, currently, in 2025, live in an age where a lot of these standards and norms and what we thought was normal gets questioned and reshuffled and sometimes completely changed.
Like, on a basis that humanity has never experienced before.
Ah, like on a scale?
On a scale of, like, I don't know how long humans have existed. I feel like I should be able to pull out a number, given that I'm sort of a scientist.
The answer is not even a billion years. Probably not a million years. Maybe a couple of hundreds of thousands or something. Not sure.
We haven't existed on Earth for all that long, but in that period, most of the time, we were concerned with the food we get the next day.
Do we have food? Do we have shelter? Can we procreate? Those were the three main concerns that humanity has had for most of our existence.
Yeah.
It's only in a really, really recent time that we were starting to able to think, hey, we can plan next year. Right?
Right. Yeah.
We have a concept of next year now. And then people started to plan for the future. People started to care about the next generation because you will see the next generation living for a whole lot longer than you used to.
03:00
You had a higher chance of getting in and out of this world a lot quicker than we do now.
Yeah.
You were lucky if you get to see your children get old.
Right.
It's still a very grateful thing to be able to do if you get to do that.
You mean it in the sense of it was a rarer thing, right? It was not a frequent thing.
Right. It was a lot rarer thing. We did not have a choice more often than not.
Now we have that option. And that kind of different timescales that we can think about shifts the way we think. Right?
Suddenly our priorities are different. And what we deem to be meaningful is different.
And even in that era that we decided to be able to do this kind of thing, I would say even as recently as a hundred years ago, we lived in the world where things changed in a lot slower pace than it does now.
If you were born a farmer, you were probably still a farmer when you died.
And very, very few slices of population became anything else.
Now, I think it's harder to find people who are doing the same job as your dad or your mom.
And that's unprecedented as humanities. Right?
So that's how quickly things change. That's how quickly our logic and standards and expectation change.
In this world where so many things change so quickly, including the tech tools that are available to us.
How do we know how much we need to adapt and change and what to keep the same, what you keep as a core?
And I think that's sort of big, big philosophical questions that people of our age all have to wrestle with. Right?
And I don't claim to have any answer to any of that.
But I do have an inkling that knowing something a little deeper layer than just the most user-friendly part of your life is going to help us navigate or guide what it means, what to prioritize and what will be hopefully indeed meaningful to your life.
06:04
And adapting to technology is one thing.
Being able to keep up with the new technology for some of us is probably very important depending on what we do and what we aspire to be.
But I think there is a little bit of trend where we're realizing that there are actually some values in intangible things, like things that computers famously cannot capture very well.
And this kind of intangible values is decidedly not cooperating well with a capitalistic system where we like to quantify things and give a fixed value, quantifiable values to that thing.
And it's just interesting because our OS changes are so frequent now, basically. Right?
We're not just going from 1.0 to 1.1. We're going 1.0 to 3.0 in a span of a few years.
Sure. Right, right. It matches well with the sort of exponentiation of a lot of human stuff, including humans.
And it's so fast and none of us have sort of evolved to be able to handle that kind of speed.
Yeah, yeah.
We're all kind of like first time guinea pigs here.
Yeah, and we also only get one time.
Yeah, so we don't know actually if we did it right or not.
Yeah, sorry, that's dark.
Let's pull back on the dark humor, question mark.
What do you mean? It's very humorous.
I'm feeling a deep chuckle in my soul. In case anybody heard the previous episode, that was also an example of deep sarcasm.
So this speed, and I want to make a minor correction because I double checked this for us for the Homo sapien timeline, right?
We all know the image of the big timelines that exist around the room, right?
The timeline is to scale and the humans are like a sliver of a piece of paper at the end.
Yeah.
That's roughly based on the Wikipedia page for timeline of human evolution.
The anatomically modern humans by definition is 0.8 million years ago.
If you want to push it, that is back to the super family, which is probably pushing it pretty far back.
That's like great apes level. Humans, great apes, roughly like 15 to 20 million years ago.
This is on the span of 4 billion life start years, so to speak, right?
09:02
So this is why it's that sliver of life.
Okay.
So I was a little hyperbolic before.
Okay. So speed though, right? We're in this sliver of slivers, right?
We're in a sliver of slivers and the speed has increased in a way that we really weren't prepared to process.
People are obviously attempting to adapt, right?
And we're also creating tools that in essence can help us to keep pace with our own type of running wheel adjustments.
I'm not going to say they function all the time.
I'm not going to say they work well.
I think part of the design is that where you'll hear people talk about offloading your thoughts or outsourcing your thoughts.
I think it comes more from business terminology, right?
Outsourcing your work, sort of placing, taking the burden off of you to put it to somebody else.
But this again comes with that question of what is gained or lost because you ask, okay, well, when I outsource it outwards, am I going to lose something I need or want for a maybe fuller life to some degree, right?
And are you even aware that you're doing that? You're outsourcing your thinking?
Absolutely. Yes, because we don't.
Because if you're introduced to it, just like we hinted at in the last episode with the digital native type idea that it's always that way, you don't.
Because you might not notice that you were kind of only given one choice till later, which could lead to frustration maybe.
And maybe that could push you to do more or to act on changing that.
These are also possibilities, but it does create that tension.
And to be not nostalgic, but that sort of briefly with you for a moment, looking back at the past and also saying some of that pace.
We may have hit a couple of sweet spots, but never at the same time, I think, for different groups of people, different careers, different jobs.
Of speed to human satisfaction with what they were doing.
There have probably been moments of this. I had one example given to me as an anecdote the other day.
That was from somebody who had also done a PhD program and had gone off into the field afterwards.
They were recalling how they were reading some papers from 50 years ago at that point.
And the science was slow.
It was small, notable, sound science.
Could have hundreds of printed pages or something of things talking about this one thing.
And very light hypothesis conclusion type things.
12:06
Not grand savior of the planet type conclusions.
Just like, we think that it's like 0.3 Kelvin different.
In this really specific way it worked.
Right. That's the idea, right?
This sort of like intentionality there.
There's a whole lot of other stuff in different eras in the past that are problematic.
If I could risk using the wrong words, I would say maybe there was a time.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time.
