You have this backwards. We are dealing with orders of magnitude more information than we did in ancient times, and we are required to remember a good chunk of it and to be able to recall and use it at a moments notice.
Computers are a big factor in generating all of that information, even if they help process some of it the net effect is a huge surplus.
> We are dealing with orders of magnitude more information than we did in ancient times, and we are required to remember a good chunk of it and to be able to recall and use it at a moments notice.
Surely you mean required, meaning you could end up embarassing yourself in front of your coworkers if you aren't able to recall that particular bit of information.
It's very different from REQUIRED, meaning that if you take a left turn instead of a right turn while running away from a predator you end up in a canyon... or the predator eats you because you have no way to escape...or both.
I don't think I have it backwards. I don't remember anything or know much about the world in general terms. I just know and remember enough key phrases for google to give me the answers when I need them which requires very little cognitive effort on my part. [1]
That wasn't the argument. You seem to be saying that the increasing volume of digital information will require new cognitive adaptations and I'm saying that's not the case because I don't need to be as smart to appear smart on a digital medium, I can just rely on external cognitive aids like google.
Yes but let's say, pre-writing people needed to remember 100% of all information they needed to use - which writing people can offload to tablets and parchments.
Pre-agriculture people had it worse, they needed to remember 100% of all pertinent informations by the hunting band, which had a max amount of 50-100 people. All the predictive abilities for preys in their lands, natural disasters, medicines, rituals, etc.
It's logical that adoption of technology and farming led to lesser pressure for memory recall, at least for the median human.
Computers are a big factor in generating all of that information, even if they help process some of it the net effect is a huge surplus.