Let’s start with data.

Too much, right? Wrong. We should dismiss most of what is described in giga, tera, zeta, exa or whatever terms. Why?

Because it does not matter. Ask yourself. What matters? I’ll tell you what matters, and you’ll agree, I guess.

If I’m hungry, I eat. Not much data involved in that.

If I’m horny, well, censored. But not much data involved in that.

If I have a meeting at 21h, I need to get up and open that zoom link at 20:55. Not much that involved in that.

You’ll say, but your sensors, like eyes, ears, skin, smell, maybe tongue, they ingest gazzillions of bits. They do. But the processing thereof is parallel to the extent of each reacting cell actually only needing to respond to very low bandwith.

Ah, cut this crap.

My whole point that I wanted written down was that there’s a great reason why we just need one mouth to communicate and a language that codifies at most a few ten bits per second. And yet, that communication is far far more intelligent that that of supercomputers taking in the zetabytes we started this post with.

How come? What about if intellingence is really not about data, but more about proper reactions to circumstances? I think the quality of my thinking, or yours, is not about the amount of data processed, but rather about taking the right decisions. Because only decisions and actions derived from these matter. All else is noise. And yes, we make crazy amounts of noise. And withouth re-thinking our thinking, we try to ingest more and more and more.

Wrong way.