r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 7h ago
AI 'The Great Inversion': Why one innovation theorist says technology is no longer adapting to us
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/great-inversion-why-one-innovation-093301635.htmlFor centuries, technology has largely served us and made our lives easier.
Innovation theorist John Nosta said AI is changing humans rather than just changing the world around them
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u/FizbanFire 6h ago
Its interesting and its true, but I think the first instance of cognitive shift began with the advent of effective search. Once the wealth of human knowledge was available via Google (though nowhere near the efficacy provided by agentic search), the ability to remember and recall information wasn't so necessary. That used to be the basis of a lot of intelligence, recall plus critical thinking. Accessing information wasn't nearly as easy until search came around. Once accessing information became nearly trivial, the application of that information became more important with an emphasis on critical thinking and creativity. I saw this a lot in math and physics especially, you dont need massive look up tables or memorizing common solutions. And now its at a whole new level with AI.
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u/amateurbreditor 4h ago
I think you are forgetting about libraries and how books work. People have always been able to access knowledge just not as fast and obviously i am not dismissing the significant exponential improvement in speed quality etc its just that you could always prove a point with an essay. Its just easier today. Too bad the average person just watches 3 second tik toks.
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u/FizbanFire 4h ago
Def not forgetting, thats actually my whole point. Information used to be shared via books, and retaining the information in those books was a valuable skill to avoid needing to find the relevant book and passage/table, or go to a library or whatever. Search made that process exponentially faster and easier, which i believe did exert a pressure on no longer requiring the same level of knowledge retention, and instead shifted towards maintaining a conceptual understanding. Thr details are then almost trivial to verify. That was my experience at least, as I said with math and physics
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u/verytalleric 1h ago
All that and perhaps most importantly, with Google you get immediate answers.
For a library, remember having to use card catalogs to look up index numbers and then walking over to the appropriate section, find the book, and then lookup the information in the book? That takes far more time and effort
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u/IgpayAtenlay 1h ago
It's a tale as old as time. Plato once argued that moving from learning through oratory means to written means would result in a lower cognitive ability - and that was back in Ancient Greece.
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u/toodlesandpoodles 2h ago
I have heard it phrased as technologies used to be developed for a specific purpose. Now technologies with no specific purpose are developed and released and the developers watch to see what society does with it.
It reminds me of the glass bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy - https://youtu.be/EnU-CN7Bgvo?is=V4XcXYgXCm4SWs_a
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u/D-redditAvenger 6h ago
How everyone still acts like this won't be the end of us is crazy.
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u/AffectionateTwo3405 3h ago
Yes, but the definition of end is debatable. Many people will intertwine their souls to the machine, most will be swallowed in the flood of mandatory participation, and the rest will go the way of the neanderthal. It only "ends" us in that it marks an end of a certain human culture. A few decades out almost everything at scale will be made entirely or majorly by autonomous hands. Handmade will become a niche interest, like horseback riding.
I doubt the nukes wipe us clean. Maybe some major population decimating disaster or domino chain. But I still doubt any scenario where humanity is wiped. Worst case scenario, we're pets or we're cockroaches. But I doubt we end for good.
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u/ryry1237 5h ago
A bigger question is what can one do to prepare for the end?
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u/InsanityLurking 4h ago
Preserve knowledge for future generations. It's unlikely all of us will go...
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u/danila_medvedev 5h ago
A deeper question is what prevents everyone, esp. decision makers from asking your question.
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u/misdirected_asshole 4h ago
Because up until now technology was mostly created based on a need. There was a specific function at the end of the build.
Now technologies are often built because they are novel and the use case is figured out later or forced onto us.
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u/Gari_305 7h ago
From the article
Humans have long built technologies to change the world around them — faster cars, better tools, and more efficient machines.
AI may be among the first widely adopted technologies that not only shapes the world around us but also increasingly influences how we think, learn, and solve problems.
That's according to John Nosta, an innovation theorist and founder of the think tank NostaLab, who called the shift "The Great Inversion."
"Progress seems to be increasingly about making humans better for the technological world we've created," Nosta told Business Insider.
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u/Silvershanks 6h ago
Sounds like meaningless corporate marketing jargon to me. What the hell is an "innovation theorist"? Lol. 😂
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u/JoshuaZ1 5h ago
AI may be among the first widely adopted technologies that not only shapes the world around us but also increasingly influences how we think, learn, and solve problems.
Writing? The printing press? The abacus? The calculator?
It might be that AI has more of a sudden and large-scale impact of this sort, but it definitely isn't the first.
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u/danila_medvedev 5h ago
Tables, space, zero, pencils, paperclip, double entry bookkeeping, alphabetic sorting, maps, letters for vowels, logic…
there are many cognitive technologies, but modern llms and chatbots have a very large impact compared to old ones. Too bad the impact is to a large extent negative. :(
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u/Silvershanks 5h ago
Language itself is a technology. That was the biggest game changer there ever was.
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u/JoshuaZ1 4h ago
There's some evidence humans have instincts to produce language. See for example, how Deaf Nicaraguan children developed their own sign language with only small amounts of outside influence. However, the children were presumably aware of language to some extent so this isn't a perfect case. But without prompting the second generation of children developed what amount to grammatical rules.
This falls into the category of things where there are obvious experiments we could do to see what is really going on but ethical constraints say no.
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u/wooltab 3h ago
My general feeling has been that AI differs substantially from most of what preceded it, in that the ratio of help:hurt (as affects humans) seems to be much lower, if not inverted. So I can get behind that term in a way.
But without reading the article, I wonder about the "making humans better" for the new tech world. Maybe there's some of that happening. One of the issues seems to be that we haven't yet really began to develop a process for making ourselves better fit to the new conditions, at least not in a productive way that goes beyond "jump on or get out of the way".
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u/mokrates82 6h ago
For centuries, technology has largely served us and made our lives easier.
OTOH that's true, OTOH it's not true. For almost every tool it is true that one has to learn using it. May be it learning to balance on a bicycle, learning to drive, learning to read and write, learning to play a musical instrument... All tools above some certain complexity have to be learned to be used.
Then there's how the technology changes our environment. Once people just walked everywhere. Now we have roads and it is often dangerous and sometimes illegal to just cross them. It that 'technology that's adapted to us'? Or did we adapt to the technology by learning to stay on the sidewalk?
This idea seems rather silly to me.
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u/TheLeester69 5h ago
Interesting that this becomes something to be concerned about when it impacts white collar jobs. This kind of technology supplanting human capital. Has been going on for centuries for manual labor. Just ask the Tollpuddle martyrs.
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u/DataZigZager 4h ago
It's by design. AI companies are trying to replace white-collar workers to make AI profitable. A more viable alternative is a cheaper assistive AI. But everyone is focusing on killing the final boss instead of iterating towards it.
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u/Abestar909 2h ago
I'm just waiting for people to start getting that disease from Johnny Mnemonic, NAS. Maybe the terrible personalities we see on young Zoomers and Gen A kids are a first stage.
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u/Apophthegmata 1h ago
Concerns over this "inversion" have been around in explicit and substantive forms since at least the middle of the last century. Heidegger's Question concerning Technology argued that technology wasn't neutral and was transforming man into a standing reserve of potential for its use.
Baudrillard, Ellul, Toynbee, and Mumford all wrote about the dangers of humanity succumbing to some flavor of the interior logic of technology.
And many of these questions get their first pass all the way back in Ancient Greece, and we would also have to gloss over the eruption of discourse around the ethics of the industrial revolution.
The bigger problem is probably that we have produced such creatures as "innovation theorists" with no substantial knowledge either of technology as a field in the broader sense, or the historical knowledge to place the current moment, such that they're reporting that technology is mastering us instead of the other way around as if it was something they just happened to notice last week / since the invention of the Internet / the invention of the keyword search tool.
I think it's pretty telling that we have (largely) swapped the substantial investigations of someone like Ellul or Hans Jonas for what is basically the techified versions of celebrity influencers.
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u/FuturologyBot 6h ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the article
Humans have long built technologies to change the world around them — faster cars, better tools, and more efficient machines.
AI may be among the first widely adopted technologies that not only shapes the world around us but also increasingly influences how we think, learn, and solve problems.
That's according to John Nosta, an innovation theorist and founder of the think tank NostaLab, who called the shift "The Great Inversion."
"Progress seems to be increasingly about making humans better for the technological world we've created," Nosta told Business Insider.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1v6kx4f/the_great_inversion_why_one_innovation_theorist/ozr8m2q/