Human Universals.

To a Denisovan, this might have been Margot Robbie.

If you look at the history of homo-sapiens--though it probably goes back further, to Denisovans and Neanderthals and other ancient human forms that were subsumed by sapiens--there's one thing we have always strived for: the ability to make sense of a world we don't really understand. 

Viagra. 30,000 years ago.

So began religion, cave painting, myth, story, and a thousand other practices that were attempts to control the uncontrollable uncontrollable. And most things, if you spend a moment thinking about them, are uncontrollable. 

You should meet my dog, for instance.

Right now I'm reading about the wisdom of the ancient Mesopotamians. It's easy and very Western of us when learning of different cultures to put them down and scoff at their superstitions and oddities. Just like we might laugh at a commercial like this, as the nadir of sophistication, and say "what could they possibly have been thinking?"

Just as Pulitzer-winner Ed Yong talks about in his great book on animal perception and adaptability, "An Immense World," it's easy to think of "others" as dumb because we don't take the time or have the sensitivity to appreciate their unique acuity. Or, as Einstein never said, "If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

Just to go all hoity-toity on you, as the writer Marcel Proust once said, “The only true voyage… would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes… to see the hundred universes that each of them sees.”

Ashurbanipal won no FIFA peace prize.

But, back to Ashurbanipal in Assyria about 2700 years ago. When Ashurbanipal, the king of the world's mightiest empire. When Ashy wanted to know what was going to go down (as the kids say) he consulted his seers, intellectuals and sages. They, in turn turned to extispicy, which is not a Kentucky Fried Chicken offering.

Ashurbanipal's advisors read sheep livers, and could foretell the future that way. Here's a 4-minute video of Assyriologist and author of the book shown above, Selena Wisnom, showing us how extispicy works. It's said that some markings in sheep livers actually looked like Mesopotamian writing--Cuneiform. It's as if the gods had written messages just for us. 

Extispicy was one way the ancients believed they could see the future. After all, the gods we're always sending us signals. They weren't distant and far away. They were always around if you knew how to look.

The other Assyrian manner of prediction was Astronomy. Their chief astronomer during the time of Ashurbanipal was a guy called Balasi. Winsom, above writes, “Balasi would not have cast a horoscope for the king, or sought his own destiny in the stars, but saw himself more as a translator of a divine code, reading the messages that the gods were sending in the sky and conveying them to their intended recipient.”

If you read the underlined above there's a lot to take in.

I'd argue that most of the tech-world believes at some level that data and its concomitant crystal-ball, AI, are "divine code." That is, "messages that the gods were sending...to their intended recipient" (musk, altman, karp, amodei--the pantheon of AI visionaries.)

At some point, maybe, humanity will develop some sort of accurate predictive capability. We'll know exactly when a stock should be bought, when the steak is perfectly medium rare, when to get an on-time flight to Mustique at a value price, when the bomb the shit out of an adversary real or imagined. We'll know what combination of words and images will drive sales through the roof with virtually no media support. We'll know whether or not to kiss the girl when we see her home. 

We'll have entrails or stars or algorithms or super-positioned electrons that will tell us exactly when to flip our predictive pancakes.

My guess however is that accurate predictive capability will always be just over the horizon. It'll always be next quarter, or like cleaning carbon out of the atmosphere, something we'll do by 2030.

It's worth remembering that Isaac Newton, a once-in-a-millennia-mind who today is famous for his advances in physics and mathematics, spent most of his time working on alchemy. He considered alchemy--turning base-metals into gold--a godlike area of enquiry.

In other words, next time you hear about a splendiferous advance in our ability to see and predict the future, think about how close we are--not how far we are--from looking at ovine offal and saying, "I'm betting on the Knicks. That blood vessel tells me to--it looks like Jalen Brunson."

Much of technology, many of the world's pundits, are based on magical thinking. Thinking that a year or a decade or a century from now will be derided and laughed at. Next time you hear about some splendor of machine "learning," or artificial "intelligence" consider that the worse client or account person you ever dealt with has over six-trillion synapses in their brain. Most of our technologies are run on a series of "yes/no" options--that despite all the bluster and private equity money being raised are right about as often as they're wrong. The first three minutes of Hans Rosling's 4,200,000-million-view Ted Talk is more than worth your attention. 

Of course science has advanced since 1000BC, 1000AD and even 2025AD.

But not as far as our humanity--our core need to believe we're in control of big-bang-randomly-exploded and propelled particles--wants to believe it's advanced.

That'll happen tomorrow.