The history of technology revolves around how we interact with information. From the invention of the written language by Sumerians in 3400 BCE to the invention of the printing press in Germany in the 15th century, the internet and countless other technological developments in the process, it was all about how we generate, store, share, and search for information.
What’s changed is the landscape of information, which shaped our perspective toward information. Until very recently, humans have been living with scarce information. It’s only in the 20th century when anyone could access any information they needed or wanted via various technological developments that changed over time (from the library system to Chat GPT now). It’s true that some groups of people in the world still live with limited access to the information because of political (e.g. dictatorship limiting the access to the internet), socio economic reasons (e.g. lack of education opportunities due to poor economic conditions) or cultural reasons (e.g. access to certain information limited due to religious agenda). Yet overall, the scarcity of information is no longer the landscape we live in. We can search for any information on Google (or any other search engines of your choice). We can learn about how to do anything on Youtube. We can share whatever we want to share with anyone on all kinds of social media (Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc). We can also create and generate more information with just a single prompt via Generative AI tools such as Chat GPT.
This change certainly calls for a new perspective toward information — what do we do with the excess information? This is an important shift in perspective we ought to think about, because we can’t live in the new landscape of excessive information with the mindset of scarcity, trying to accumulate and consume more information as much as possible. Such dissonance causes so much unnecessary suffering for us.
However, we see this dissonance in our behavior unfortunately. We subject ourselves to consume the endless streams of information on the short-form video platforms and messaging apps unconsciously and wonder why we feel so tired all the time. We feel forever “behind” as we haven’t watched the most popular show on Netflix yet or we don’t know what is trending on X or Tik Tok. The latest example of dissonance between the landscape of excessive information and our compulsion to process more information based on the mindset of scarcity is obvious with the General AI tools. We feel so overwhelmed or threatened by the emergence of the General AI tools that we either criticize it heavily, declaring it as a threat to humanity or jump on the wagon in a hurry, trying not to miss out.
So, what shall be our perspective toward information in the age of excess, not scarcity? What should we think about information? The first point to think about is the role of information — why does it matter so much? It’s because they are critical to build knowledge and eventually, intelligence. Our species wasn’t the strongest physically but we were able to survive and thrive thanks to our intelligence compared to other species. Therefore, for most of human history, we were obsessed with collecting and finding new ways to search for and process more information in order to develop “general intelligence” of humanity. Naturally, we can say that the advent of AI was predicted; we created technology that could support humans to process much more information faster than ever before.
Therefore, the new perspective with this new landscape of excessive information might be about how we should understand our intelligence. Our perspective on our intelligence has focused narrowly on cognitive intelligence. However, we’re not just a machine to process more information as efficiently as possible. We can delegate it easily to great technologies we created and they are much better equipped to do that. Perhaps in this age of technological developments that enabled the abundance of information, we can expand our understanding of human intelligence to emotional intelligence and biological intelligence that we haven’t paid much attention to as a whole being.
Expanding our understanding of intelligence into emotional intelligence is particularly apt and necessary now, as it could help us resolve the dissonance indicated above. When the scarcity of information is no longer the reality, the more information doesn’t mean better. What’s more critical is getting the right information for what we want. This requires us to have higher clarity of self-awareness. Do we know exactly what we need and want? Can we tell what is right and what is wrong for our purpose? What is our intention with regard to XYZ information? With emotional intelligence, we can decide how to discern the information we need from what we don’t and be more intentional about how to use certain information based on higher clarity of self-awareness.
Even when we are clear about our intentions and able to discern the right information, it’s very easy to get lost and distracted in the constant stream of information. What’s important in this context is being able to pay attention to what matters to us, which is another domain of emotional intelligence. In his seminal book on attention, “Stand Out of Our Light”, James Williams says:
“Functional distraction” is what’s commonly meant by the word “distraction” in day-to-day use. This is the sort of distraction that Huxley called the “mere casual waste products of psychophysiological activity.” Like when you sit down at a computer to fulfill all the plans you’ve made, to do all those very responsible and adult things you know at the back of your mind you absolutely must do, and yet you don’t: instead, your unconscious mind outruns your conscious mind, and you find yourself, forty-five minutes later, having read articles about the global economic meltdown, having watched auto-playing YouTube videos about dogs who were running while sleeping, and having voyeured the life achievements of some astonishing percentage of people who are willing to publicly admit that they know you, however little it may actually be the case.
The deterioration of attention happens on many levels with the excess of information. In the 24 hour nonstop news reporting on any media, the quality of our attention can get obscured easily. In 2016, the former CBS Chairman Les Moonves was quoted as saying, “Trump’s candidacy may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS”. In this fierce competition of grabbing our attention with any bits of information, we feel more divided and our perspective gets pigeonholed. In this state, we aren’t in control of the information; we’re controlled by the information. With such deterioration of attention, it becomes harder to remember what we originally wanted or who we intended to be.
I don’t think this is the way we want to live, controlled by the information. At least I don’t hope that for myself or my loved ones. This is why we must double down on developing our emotional intelligence and try to see ourselves and others as a whole being, not limited to the data processing machine. With clear self-awareness, we can be more mindful of what matters to us and we won’t react instantly to the unpleasant email from a coworker. With better understanding of how we feel in our body and mind, we can notice the fear in our system when we read negative breaking news and make a better decision carefully, without getting squandered by the fear, but being mindful of it.
If our desire to develop intelligence was what drove humanity early on, I strongly believe that our emotional intelligence is the next frontier for us to advance humanity for a more benevolent future, after all. There will not be a dystopia created by AI tools or technology alone. There is no competition between us and AI tools or technology. AI (or technology) is, because we are. Technology reflects our intention and attention all the time. Before we criticize the potential dark night technology can create, we should look inside ourselves and the mindless systems and patterns that inhibit us from looking inside. When we are more mindful of our intention and know how to pay our attention to the right matter by focusing on our emotional intelligence, it’ll be reflected in technology too.
