#3 Automatic Specialization

Kolkata - 3rd August 2021

We mold ourselves to fit in with our environment. That environment includes both people and things.

When we depend on tools that can compensate our weakness, we abandon our inbuilt tools, and convert our weakness into strengths by extending into those external tools. Our brains are adaptive organisms, and will take every opportunity to become more efficient and make its own life easier. That's why we don't remember things that we can look up, because looking up is easier than remembering. Our brain actually perceives the internet as part of our memory, in dramatic case of cognitive offloading.

When we live together with people what compensate our weakness, we as individuals each tend to sacrifice generality, to make the group of people living together becomes a more robust and powerful unit. The only requirement for such specialization is trust.

This is simply a broader take on the basic economic principles of trade. When two actors each can produce two different goods at different rates, both actors are well off if they each specialize in what they do best and then trade with each other.

Everything in nature seems to grow in this pattern, general functioning actors eventually specialize and form larger complex units, in a recursive manner.

What makes us infinitely extensible is our capacity for automatic specialization.