Computational Integration

Human beings have been inventing things for hundreds of thousands of years, from tools, language, and art in the stone ages (1, 2) to robots and artificial intelligence today. You might say we invented ourselves, since tools, cooking, art, and language pre-date the evolutionary stage we call Homo sapiens.

Some inventions, like language and art, have become integral to our human experience. Other inventions, such as nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence, pose a threat to our very existence. And yet, the vast majority of our inventions have promoted human flourishing by allowing us to offload our labor onto devices that we direct and control, liberating our resources for other things. Computational Integration is an invention that allows us to offload our cognitive tasks onto digital devices that we direct and control, liberating our cognitive resources for bigger and better things.