The Intelligence Age

So let's imagine you're a genius but you're living in the early stone age (paleolithic era).

Being a stone-age genius is basically useless as you are too busy doing caveman stuff to study maths or write a book.

You would have thought about the problems immediately in-front of you like how are those animals likely to behave or how do I teach my son to be more stealthy when we're hunting. (not that there is anything wrong with thinking about this stuff, these are important problems).

The Neolithic revolution brought agriculture and eventually cities. Technically this spanned from late stone age through bronze, iron, medieval etc but I call the whole period "Agricultural Age".

OK so if you're a smart person in the Agricultural Age, there are now people living in cities who have enough time to write books and study maths.

However maths has limited practical use without industrial technology. You don't have the precise measuring instruments needed for science experiments for example. Even if you knew how to make a space-ship you wouldn't be able to do it because the manufacturing capability didn't exist.

So the line between maths and philosophy and even theology is blurred. The number zero was considered heretical at certain points in history because Zero’s association with the void or "nothingness" conflicted with the Christian idea of God as an ever-present, all-encompassing being.

So essentially people wrote lots of great books about philosophy and theology and abstract maths but essentially this intellectual work was not very applicable. I.e. you couldn't use it to solve real problems.

The industrial age meant you could make whatever you want, as-long as you know how to make it. This means that inventors were needed to invent useful stuff to make, so now intellectual work was finally useful.

It allowed to build electrical networks, cars, space-ships, computers.

So essentially in the industrial age the only limit of what we can do is what we can figure out how to make. This means that human intellect is not only now useful but the limiting factor of progress.

For example a large thing that limits the use of computers is just how expensive and slow software engineers are. It's 2024 and I still often have to use janky broken websites (particularly government ones) which to me is indicative that there isn't enough human brain-power to actually program all the computers.

In-fact most computer users don't know how to program it at-all they just use pre-compiled software written by someone else.

So it's very obvious that humans brain-power is bottle-necking progress. It may be that we already have the tools and materials to build a warp-drive but just no-one knows how to do it.

The invention of AI will move us into the next age, the Intelligence Age.

The Intelligence Age removes the final bottleneck on progress. Combining our industrial age capability to make anything we want with Intelligence Age ability to know how to make it we will finally be able to make badass things like an iron-man suit or a death-star.

What will be the next limit? I'm not sure but probably raw resources. I imagine we'll start to run out of precious metals and stuff.