What made humans the dominant species on Earth?
Knowledge.
But if an LLM that can fit on a 16GB USB can reliably outperform 99% of humans on the test filters we're currently using, maybe it's time we evaluated the filters.
how did human systems end up this way
Millennia ago, when humans lived in small tribes and faced existential threats daily, we didn't really have the luxury of asking ChatGPT if a berry was safe to eat-obviously. Naturally, any information about the environment was hard-earned through trial and error.
Our grandfather got attacked by a bear after going to that cave at night, so that cave is bad.
This kind of tribal knowledge was passed down by word of mouth and was absolutely essential to survival. Knowing one fact was the difference between life or death.
Eventually, as human settlements got more complex, the leaders and elders of the tribe naturally accumulated more facts, becoming the wise figures that any young person would consult before heading into the unknown of the world.
This system worked. The complexity of the world was limited to physical reality, and the cost of not knowing anything was orders of magnitude more expensive than knowing partial or even incorrect facts.
when things ossified
This kind of tribal orally recited knowledge became deeply embedded as being valuable. The spread of knowledge was completely bound by the limits of verbal communication and experience - if you didn't know someone who knew, you'd either learn after burning yourself, or never at all.
For 99% of human history, the one who could recite more almost always actually understood more. It was so stable, in fact, that the entire substrate of human civilization ordered around visible (or audible) knowledge, or even proximity to systems that maintained and perpetuated them - institutions.
institutions are immortal
Institutions lived longer than any one human, so knowledge could persist indefinitely as long as it was maintained. Writing was extremely inefficient, and written knowledge concentrated in groups that acted as the conduits for this knowledge - this was the only viable form of scaling up information distribution.
Next inflection point: The printing press changed humanity's capability - knowledge could be replicated at a scale previously completely unthinkable. At the time, the Church was not happy with how their monopoly over reading the Bible - and thus interpreting the Bible - was now obsolete.
Skip forward to the internet, and the ability to literally access all knowledge of humanity in less than a second. A complete gamechanger. Which then freed up our mental headspace and focus to use knowledge in new ways... right?
the residue
Let's look at 2025 now. The residue of the structures we observed are all still visible in modern civilization:
- Schools and Colleges still test for the ability to recall information - even when retrieval is literally trivial
- Institutions that gatekept the access to information still hold power, and they also perpetuate the appearance of having special access to information through prestige - even when knowledge is completely democratized.
I could give more examples, but the core pattern is consistent and dead simple:
We live in a world that was structured for information scarcity - even as we have LLMs that will explain literally anything to you 100 times until you understand.
In other terms: the scarcity of static information is completely obsolete, and mastery of past knowledge is unnecessary.
what this means for all of us
We're living through the transitional phase of humanity where we're looking around and realizing that anyone can now learn anything. This is not to say that learning is useless, but one thing is clear:
If learning is defined as recalling static information, then an LLM will outperform a human every single time.
Which leaves the most important question of all:
will humans still need knowledge?
I have a strong opinion - no, humans don't need knowledge as we've known it. The truth is that the most exceptional humans in history were the same ones who synthesized what didn't exist before.
In mid 2025, AI still hasn't gotten to the level where it can autonomously synthesize new science and knowledge - but I suspect it's only a matter of time before it can. The rate of change seems to be exponential, and because humans aren't very good at understanding non-linear growth, my intuition (and science) tells me our predictions are likely to be wrong.
The scariest part about this isn't that knowledge is fluid and ever-changing, it's that we are optimized for static knowledge. The infrastructure of humanity is simply unprepared for a world where an expert can become outdated in a week - but we're already living in that timeline.
humanity: what now?
I don't have the answers. And that's where all of us need to start: by admitting that things cannot go on the way they are. The current systems are resistant to change precisely because the act of saying "I don't know what we do next, but I know that this isn't it." is social death. Even though all of us know it.
Humans are very adaptable, to the point where sometimes we adapt to dysfunctional systems and cling to them as normal. But we are not naturally inclined to constant change. These two opposing forces are clearly the source of the modern dissonance:
1. Things should continue to be the way they always were
- Things are changing faster than we can react
The result? most people just bury their head in the sand and ignore it because the cost of change is too much, even when the price of total collapse is colossal.
Here's the anti-dote in my view:
we need to ask more.
If/When AGI and ASI arrive, it will be smarter than any human and be able to answer things no human can. When that's true, what matters most is what questions we choose:
- When everything is knowable - What's really worth knowing?
- If all resources are abundant - What's really worth spending our time on?
- If AI dwarfs us in intelligence, knowledge, capability - What really makes us human?
Most importantly, I think each person needs their own answer to the one question that's haunted humanity from the very beginning:
Who am I really? And who do I want to be?
written w/o AI by Pruthvi Bhat.