This week’s prompt: My tennis-obsessed summer of 2007

The Australian summer of 2007/08 was glorious. With my first year of university in the rearview mirror, I was free to focus more seriously on the pursuit of happiness. For a good friend Justin and I, this pursuit took us (at least once per week) to two destinations:

The local tennis courts and the local McDonald’s.

Every few days, Justin would pull up at the back of my house in his ute and I’d leap inside, tennis gear in hand. Without fail, as he started the engine, Justin would ask: “which way is it?”.

We’d been to the tennis courts and to McDonald’s dozens of times. They’re both in the same direction, requiring the same right turn at the end of my street. Justin’s was a question with only one possible answer, meaning it’s a question that doesn’t need to be asked. What gives?

Justin had a summer job installing ‘For Sale’ signs all over Sydney for his dad’s real estate agency. A few days a week, he’d drive round in his ute, loaded with signboards, a list of addresses and the GPS on his phone. Constantly visiting new destinations all over Sydney’s sprawl meant Justin always followed the GPS to get where he was going, including my house. This is a crucial piece of background I’d only put into context much later.

The Santa Fe Institute is the world headquarters for complexity science, operated as an independent, not-for-profit research and education centre located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The field of complexity science aims to develop a set of principles to understand the most profound societal challenges we face. The Santa Fe institute is literally the wrestling ring for the most wicked problems on earth. Unsurprisingly, it attracts a collection of extremely gifted individuals keen to put complexity in a headlock.

Since 2015, David Krakauer has served as President and resident professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. In a 2016 article titled ‘Will A.I. Harm Us? Better to Ask How We’ll Reckon With Our Hybrid Nature’, Krakauer argues we’ve been adding artificial elements to our intelligence for centuries, from the first stone carvings, to the astrolabe, the abacus and now AI. These are all examples of cognitive artifacts (more simply thought of as mental tools) we’ve used to amplify our intelligence or extend our minds. In his article, Krakauer seeks to better understand the differences between the cognitive artifacts we have at our fingertips. For example, we intuitively understand that learning to read a map is different to dropping an address into a GPS and following the arrow, but how?

Krakauer usefully classifies these myriad mental tools into two categories: competitive and complementary cognitive artifacts. Krakauer introduces a Map and a GPS, respectively, as an example of a complementary cognitive artifact and a competitive cognitive artifact. Both tools help humans navigate the world, but the process by which they do so is fundamentally different.

After a while using a map, one no longer needs the map to be physically present in order to wayfind. A map complements human cognition; using a map for an extended period of time makes one better at navigation. On the other hand, the cognition provided by a GPS competes against our own cognition, ultimately replacing it. Krakauer explains: “In the case of competitive artifacts, when we are deprived of their use, we are no better than when we started.”

Put another way, relying solely on the GPS to get around means you still won’t be able to find your way to McDonald’s after a long hot summer of practice.

A prompt for you: Which cognitive artifacts are you using today? Are they complementary or competitive?