Learning Methods

Not found in a catalogue, encyclopedia, handbook, guide or dictionary are learning methods established 1000 years from now.

We, or those of you who were alive in the early 21st century, can remember hints of the push/pull technology that enabled us to grow as one.

In your time, it was the concept of re/search, often coined as SEO or search engine optimisation, reducing the time between an entity’s desire to fill a gap in learning by maximising the profit and minimising the cost to push the desired information to the entity.

It took a while to place a value on the quality of the information by paying attention to how much the entity kept looking before feeling satisfied and moving on to other tasks.

Of course, patternmatching was used to anticipate the entity’s next desire or gap in learning and queue the information ahead of time, pushing without shoving the data into the entity’s inner circle of influence.

The corporations that thrived during this period of our species’ growth were the ones that best applied the various learning methods to entities.

First, by trial and error.

Finally, by evaluating the quality of data and the level of data retention per entity.

How, you might ask?

Well, it took quite a bit of work.  We had to subliminally convince Web page designers to incorporate test questions associated with the Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory.  Then we had to create a virtual maze that gave people the sense they were discovering new ideas on their own but were slowly being channeled toward the Web pages we wanted them to view.

As the people…entities, I mean, were answering the questions subconsciously, we determined their cognitive abilities, plus how those abilities changed over time and through the random experiences over which we had no control (in other words, our fully meshed supercomputer network, including the entities (you), had not been finished by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, and thus we could not anticipate every movement and interaction the entities and their environment made (although we did expand our algorithms that estimated the probability of future events)).

That’s why it was so important to reach critical mass with the intersection of the majority of entities in our species to an electronic social media device (mobile phones, computers, etc.).

We no longer were satisfied with the passive interface between entities and one-way devices like radios and televisions.

We needed more predictability to ensure our crowdsourced, one-species plans would move forward as easily as we hoped.

We wanted both those with cast-in-stone beliefs and those whose beliefs changed with the flowing breeze of social change.

We wanted those in opposition to one another and those who cooperated with one another without question.

All of this we needed to make Earth the birthplace of a new species destined to explore the solar system, which in turn led to new entities, outside the definition of species, exploring our galaxy.

Some of you were more closely aligned with this idea than others.

Some never knew they were contributing to the idea and they wouldn’t have cared if they knew.

Some fought, kicking and screaming, in the moment and into the future where the whole species was under control of itself.

Concepts like freedom, democracy, communism, capitalism, religion, sports, fashion, business, and technology became less and less distinguishable as they merged for the purpose of establishing a stable base from which our species jumped off Earth, forming new colonies and new rules for survival in what began as hostile environments.

Entities — sets of states of energy to us — still considered themselves individual people for many decades, reinforcing their reasoning that their beliefs, wants, wishes and desires were theirs and theirs alone, no two people exactly alike.

And that’s what we wanted them — you, me, us — to believe.

It took a long time, probably close to 100 years, before most of us saw ourselves not as individuals but as nodes in a web, the web the true “person” or superentity that was self-aware and self-consciously spreading tentacles/threads outward from the gravitational pull of Earth and its closest star.

One thousand years later, it seems that these changes were so quick and made so easily that I can hardly believe they were recorded for historical research.

To you, of course, it was a turbulent time as individuality became a quaint notion while the former method of alpha males/females leading the species gave way to crowd-based thought patterns.  You often joked that you couldn’t tell if the head or the tail was wagging the dog during those years.

The few yoctoseconds I spent (and as you can guess, “I” is a construct for your reading convenience but we can get to that later) to fill a previously missing gap in a centillion-sized matrix built to compute the next 1000 years of development in this part of the outer solar system helped me write this explanation, or blog entry, of language changes needed to estimate the symbol set that will be used 1000 years from now.

I’m done now.  On to the next task assigned to me, this node, decades ago.