Energy, from Muscle to Mind and Beyond

Part I ended with a rider on a horse and a bird in the sky, both spending energy to move something that weighed almost nothing: a handful of words. This part of the story moves fast. It moves faster than fire, faster than steam, faster than rail.

Once humanity started arbitraging the energy cost of moving information instead of matter, it was only a matter of time before it started arbitraging the energy cost of making sense of that information too.

A signal fire could cross a mountain range in minutes. A telegraph could cross an ocean in minutes too, except now the mountain range and the ocean did not matter at all. In barely two human lifetimes, the same electrical current that used to carry a signal across the ocean has started to do much more than that. It started to deliver a question, and, more strangely still, it started to carry back an answer.

Here is the pattern once more, because it never really changes: find a way to move something for less energy than it used to take, and the world reorganizes itself around the new price tag, whether that is the price of moving things or the price of moving information.

Wires did it to information. Radio did it to distance. And somewhere in a chess match in 1997, a Jeopardy! studio in 2011, and a research paper in 2017, machines quietly started doing it to human judgment.

This is the story of that arbitrage: humanity taught a pigeon to fly home so a message could travel without a human ever having to carry it, then taught a machine to compute, and subsequently to think. And, without quite meaning to, to reason.

And it unfolds from there.