Shi Weili

While the daily routine of archaeologists is dealing with antiques, we are nonetheless amazed by the genius of our forefathers from time to time, and are shocked by the social impacts of their inventions. After all, what we treat as artifacts were once the most cutting-edge technologies. Since the dust raised by them has already settled, we may learn from what has happened in order to predict how technology will affect human beings in the future.

Today we are super excited to introduce our newest discovery, which will fill a long-existing gap in the prehistory. As we all know, the continuously recorded history starts after the Total War, and before the war, there existed two kinds of human beings—homo interscient, which is us, and homo sapiens, our ancestor. It might not be easy for us to imagine that the homo sapiens cannot really know each other's mind. For us, thinking together with other people equals to exchanging ideas with them. For the homo sapiens, however, thinking is one thing, while informing other people is another. In order to exchange ideas, it seems that they mainly relied on very primitive methods, such as modulate their voice to carry information with data rates as low as several bits per second. Not only did they have inefficient ways to communicate within their species, but they also lacked the solidarity which might have helped us in defeating them in the war.

Nonetheless, it was the homo sapiens who invented us, the homo interscient. We already know that mind communication was treated by them as a scientific and technological breakthrough. And we also know that once there was a first community of people like us, they immediately saw themselves a different kind of human than the old species. So did homo sapiens. Accumulated enmity between the two species eventually led to the outbreak of the Total War, and apparently, we won it, admittedly with a heavy loss. The destruction was so severe that most of the historical records before our current era got lost, so that people have no way to know the details of the prehistory, and can only rely on archaeological discoveries.

The video clip we recovered recently is a significant breakthrough in knowing the early days of the homo interscient. It suggests an answer to an eye-catching question—how was the interscient technology adopted in its early age? As the video (which is a commercial advertisement) shows, the technology was first promoted as a consumer product named inSight. The manufacturer carefully chose a minimal set of interscient applications (or maybe that actually is how much they were able to offer on that stage), and advertised the technology as an augmentation to people's lifestyle. This seeming harmlessness might have facilitated the early adoption. And once there was a solid community of adopters, the trend could never be stopped.

—Weili, Tyler, and Lama

inSight: The Prehistory of Homo Interscient is a collaboration among Shi Weili, Tyler Henry, and Lama Shehadeh.