The Unbearable Slowness of Being
This Week: Why do we live at 10 bits/s, the Anthropic economic index, our Icarus moment
The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
Tell me about it
“The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at 109 bits/s.”
“Psychological treatments of this subject have invoked a number of metaphors for the serial nature of human cognition, such as ‘‘single channel operation,’’94 ‘‘attentional bottleneck,’’78,95 and ‘‘limited processing resources.’’96 These narratives share a common framework: sensory systems collect high-dimensional signals at a high rate with many pathways operating in parallel. After considerable filtering and reduction, these signals must compete for some central neural resource, where goals, emotions, memory, and sensory data are combined into low-dimensional deci- sions. This central neural resource can only execute its functions in series, which constrains the low throughput. But these are not explanations unless one specifies the identity of that limiting neu- ral resource, and to date, there have not been any convincing proposals.”
“The discrepancy between peripheral processing and central cognition suggests that the brain operates in two distinct modes: the outer brain is closely connected to the external world through sensory inputs and motor outputs. This is a realm of high dimensionality: many millions of sensory receptors and muscle fibers and extremely high information rates. The inner brain, on the other hand, operates on a dramatically reduced data stream, filtered to the essential few bits that matter for behavior at any one moment. The challenge for the inner brain is to combine the animal’s goals with current inputs from the world and previous memories to make decisions and trigger new actions. The information rates are very low, but the processing must remain flexible because context and goals can shift at a moment’s notice. A number of interesting research questions emerge regarding the relationship between the inner and outer brain.”
“In summary, we have a sense that major discoveries for a global understanding of brain function are waiting to be made by exploring this enormous contrast between the inner and outer brain. We need to reconcile the ‘‘high-dimensional microcircuit’’ view of the outer brain with its ultimately low-rate information products. Vice versa, one may need to adopt a more high-dimensional view of the inner brain to ac- count for the computations that happen there to organize behavior.”
Zheng, J., & Meister, M. (2025). The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?. Neuron, 113(2), 192-204.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234
The Anthropic Economic Index
Augmentation or automation?
“We leverage a recent privacy-preserving system [Tamkin et al., 2024] to analyze over four million Claude.ai conversations through the lens of tasks and occupations in the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET Database. Our analysis reveals that AI usage primarily concentrates in software development and writing tasks, which together account for nearly half of all total usage. However, usage of AI extends more broadly across the economy, with ∼ 36% of occupations using AI for at least a quarter of their associated tasks. We also analyze how AI is being used for tasks, finding 57% of usage suggests augmentation of human capabilities (e.g., learning or iterating on an output) while 43% suggests automation (e.g., fulfilling a request with minimal human involvement).
“When AI serves as an augmentative partner rather than a replacement, studies have shown improved productivity while maintaining individuals’ meaningful engagement in their work [Noy and Zhang, 2023, Peng et al., 2023, Cui et al., 2024]. These patterns can inform policy priorities—supporting the development of collaborative AI interfaces where they show clear benefits, while ensuring appropriate preparation for areas where automation becomes more prevalent.”
Handa, K., Tamkin, A., McCain, M., Huang, S., Durmus, E., Heck, S., ... & Ganguli, D. Which Economic Tasks are Performed with AI? Evidence from Millions of Claude Conversations.
https://assets.anthropic.com/m/2e23255f1e84ca97/original/Economic_Tasks_AI_Paper.pdf
https://huggingface.co/datasets/Anthropic/EconomicIndex/tree/main
https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-anthropic-economic-index
Dr William Rees Our obsolescent brains The climate, economics and overshoot
Our Icarus Moment
Problem definition is 90% of the work…
Glitches…
“Can we find ways to use the devil’s tools in service of Gaia’s work? Or are we opening a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBkl2kCdW-w
https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=hIdvAuUAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra
Reader Feedback
“Human unknowingness is the perfect description.”
Footnotes
I opened this project with a thesis: “We haven’t decided how we’re going to work, reason, and co-create with artificial agents.”
What became evident for me, this week, was that we don’t have a QWERTY keyboard for agents yet. We aren’t locked in. The assumption that it’ll be conversational isn’t quite pre-determined.
I’m getting closer to answering the question for myself: how I want to work, reason and co-create with agents. And I suspect that this is going to be very different for different people.
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