When watching the interview with Stuart Firestein, the thing that surprised me the most was when Firestein said that throughout civilized human history, the most advanced technology at the time was always compared to the brain. I find that absolutely fascinating. Beyond the fact that the info is extremely interesting by itself, because of how "obvious" it feels once you hear about it for the first time and because of its elegant simplicity, I think it also highlights how self-important we are as a species. First of all, there is the fact that we are using ourselves as a benchmark for innovation, while there are other, perhaps more accurate, benchmarks out in nature (one of the main principles behind biomimicry). Aside from that, there is also the idea that those two things are even comparable, which is a gross undervaluing on how complex our brain really is and overvaluing how complex our man-made systems are. It is laughable that we ever compared our brain with clocks or hydraulics, but our descendants might be the ones laughing at us in the future for putting neural in neural networks.
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Such an interesting perspective, Pedro! I really liked your comment about how we as humans compared the most advanced technology to that of our brains and how that reflects how "self-important" and powerful we perceive our species to be over others. Your comment made me think a lot about all of this, and I think that it adds a lot to this conversation on how humans innovate and to what standards do we evaluate these innovations.