We are practically on a kind of synchrophasotron of history.
Alexander Asmolov is a psychologist, anthropologist, academician of the Russian Academy of Education (RAO), Doctor of Psychological Sciences, and author of books on psychology. He is a student of psychologists Alexei Leontiev and Alexander Luria, associates and followers of the founder of the cultural-historical psychology school, Lev Vygotsky. Since 1988, Asmolov has held the position of chief psychologist and advisor to the chairman of the State Education Committee of the USSR, and in 1992 he became the Deputy Minister of Education, serving in this role until 1998. He currently heads the School of Anthropology of the Future at the Institute of Public Sciences of RANEPA and is the scientific supervisor of the Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis. Asmolov's main area of scientific interest is the psychology of personality and individuality.
"One of the most powerful hypotheses is that we are practically on a kind of synchrophasotron of history. The speeds are so great, history is accelerating so much that indeed, many suggest that we are living in the most unique time. Why am I smiling? Every era has its own historical rhythms. And every time we say that for Plato and Socrates everything was slower in life, and there were different rhythms, we brazenly, forgive the term, fall into the sin that I call the sin of evolutionary snobbery. Perhaps the physical rhythms were different, perhaps the mobility was different. But no one will appreciate the chronotopes that existed then. Time has always pulsed. You know, there is physical time, and there is psychological time. When I think that Petya Ivanov is much smarter than Plato just because he lives in the 21st century, that is not the case.
But what is characteristic for us today, especially for our country — I always repeat the formula that whenever you find yourself in Russia, you are always in a historical moment. Our country is a country of historical moments.
As for speeds, today is a time when we can say that a remarkable leap of a kind may indeed occur — I jokingly say — an insight of evolution, a discovery of evolution, when we will change so much that we will be a different variant of Homo sapiens, because we are growing so much with technologies, so much so that technologies transform our higher mental functions and mental pictures of the world — this has never happened before. And the emergence of another intelligence nearby makes us hurry."
"With the merging with technologies arises what I call — following a number of researchers — the built-up person, the person of extended technology. We have today grown up with digital assistants, which can in some cases become digital alter egos. We have literally entered into competition with another type of intelligence. I am always puzzled by the term artificial intelligence; I prefer another term, namely, crafted intelligence — we made it.
At the same time, the emergence of artificial intelligence is yet another chance for us (and this will help our leap as an anthropological species) to abandon or at least reduce our narcissism. All the time when we say that man is the crown of evolution, man is the highest being, we fall into the sin of anthropocentrism when we say that we are the most important on this planet."
Leave a comment