Just as the development of verbal and written languages enabled humans to efficiently collect, analyze, and share narrative information, the appearance of numbers enabled us to measure, calculate, and exchange quantitative information effectively. Most aspects of our world, particularly our physical world, are best described by numbers and by the mathematical rules that would later emerge. Mathematics gives us the ability to test the building blocks of nature and test the most fundamental things around us. Let’s understand first numbers and it scale to be able to understand AI numbers.
To help understand some of the most important features of AI numbers, it is important to first conceptually appreciate the vast sizes and scales of extremely large numbers. As humans, we are ill-equipped to easily understand how big numbers can be. We don’t have a natural sense of the enormity represented by the most extreme quantities, sizes, and speeds. None of us do. This is not for any deficit in our IQ. It is simply because of more human and biological and social realities.
Until very recently in human history, extreme numbers did not matter to us. There was never a practical need to consider them, much less fully understand them. At first, large numbers contributed nothing to our perception of the world. As early humans, we would not have gained any competitive survival advantage by being able to understand what a million or a billion of anything was. We just needed to recognize and manage the small numbers and quantities that mattered to us daily, such as the number of our family members, the number of wolves outside our cave, or the number of logs needed to sustain our fire.
As a result, our brains don’t understand them intuitively, because we don’t have any naturally developed sense of the vastness they represent. However, the size of our communities expanded, the distances we traveled increased, and the number of warriors and weapons in the armies of our enemies grew. We now look up into the night sky and marvel at the hundreds of billions of stars we have learned to exist in our galaxy, the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe.
This is an excerpt of my full article.
