James Clear recently drew my attention to a quote by the writer Teresa Nielsen Hayden that I find fascinating and mind-boggling… and that I also vehemently agree with:

“My own personal theory is that this is the very dawn of the world. We are hardly more than an eye blink away from the fall of Troy, and scarcely an interglaciation removed from the Altamira cave painters. We live in extremely interesting ancient times.”

“I like this idea. It encourages us to be earnest and ingenious and brave, as befits ancestral peoples; but keeps us from deciding that because we don’t know all the answers, they must be unknowable and thus unprofitable to pursue.”

That is fascinating because we believe we are so advanced with our computing machines, data science models, and A.I. systems, but from the lens of the coming thousands or millions of years of human life on this planet, we live in ancient times. This perspective is exciting because it means there is more to discover and invent. However, it is simultaneously intense because the future of humanity depends on us ancient folks, and we continue to develop situations that could render us extinct such as nuclear weapons, bioweapons, climate change, or artificial super intelligence. That underscores a recurring theme on the SuperDataScience Podcast around the critical importance of ethical considerations with any new innovations such as A.I. ethics, A.I. policy, and A.I. alignment considerations for any new statistical or machine learning models we devise and deploy into real-world systems.

If you’d like to learn more about how ancient we likely are in the grand scheme of human life, I recommend checking out the 12-minute YouTube video by Kurzegesagt called The Last Human – A Glimpse Into The Far Future. The link to that video can be found here.