💡 Musings of the Angry Optimist: What was humanity's first idea?

Once upon a time, there were no ideas. Not a single one. But then someone had an idea. Humanity's first.

Mathias Sundin 15.Aug.2024 4 min read

Share this story!

My thoughts, tips, and other tidbits that I believe are suited for a fact-based optimist. This newsletter is for you who are a Premium Supporter at Warp News. Feel free to share it with friends and acquaintances.

💡❓

What was humanity's first idea?

This is the question Peter Watson asks in his magnum opus, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud. A brick of a book over 1000 pages long, which I've been reading this summer while doing research for my next book, with the working title On AI.

What's your answer to the question?

Watson argues that it was stone tools:

"At some point, about 2.5 million years ago, ancient man learned that if he struck one stone against another in a particular way, a thin, keen-edged flake could be knocked off which was sharp enough to pierce the hide of a dead zebra, say, or a gazelle."

It requires the ability to imagine a tool's purpose before creating it, and the skill to manipulate a material to achieve the desired result. The idea might have emerged after accidentally finding a sharp stone. But even then, early humans needed to be able to look at another stone and think that a similar flake could be produced by striking the stone against another stone.

Once that idea was had, it could be built upon. A different kind of stone that was easier to shape, better grip, and so on. In this way, we have been building idea upon idea ever since.

This is why we make progress. The more previous ideas (knowledge) we have to build on, the better our new ideas can be. Ideas like the printing press, democracy, and the internet have helped us have more ideas and better ideas. That's why the world has made enormous progress in the last 200+ years.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

❗ Other stuff

🌊 Problem-solvers vs problem-sellers

Problem-solvers take an issue and cut it up into small, solvable chunks.
Problem-sellers do the opposite: bundling various remotely-connected issues together into one big, scary problem.
The consequence is that problem-sellers make problems look insurmountable when they're not.
— Boyan Slat (@BoyanSlat) January 24, 2022

🌊 15,000 tons of plastic collected from the ocean

Problem solver Boyan Slat's Ocean Cleanup is really gaining momentum. Over 15,000 tons of plastic collected from the Pacific Ocean.

🗳️ Tony Blair on AI: Biggest change since the industrial revolution

"I am constantly saying to my own party: 'You've got to focus on this technology revolution.' It's not an afterthought. It's the single biggest thing that's happening in the world today. It’s of a real world nature and is going to change everything."

"We're living through a period of massive change. This is for sure the biggest technological change since the Industrial Revolution."

"How do you use it to transform healthcare, education, and the way government functions? How do you help educate the private sector as to how they can embrace AI in order to improve productivity? This is a huge agenda for a government and a really exciting one."

"Sometimes people get a bit depressed about being in politics because you have all this criticism. Certainly people in the West feel that society's not changing fast enough and well enough. I say no, it's a really exciting time to be in politics because you've got this massive revolution that you've got to come to terms with."

You can find the video here:

🖌️ Flux, a new image generator that's better with text

Out of the blue, a new AI image generator called Flux appeared. The images are of high quality and it's better at handling text in images than any other service I've tested. Not perfect, it still makes mistakes quite often, but after a few attempts it succeeds.

Image generation can't be done directly on their website, but for example via Poe. Which is a service where several AI tools are gathered.