I hear a lot of talk of ‘taking over the world’. What is it to take over the world? Have I done it if I am king of the world? Have I done it if I burn the world? Have humans or the printing press or Google or the idea of ‘currency’ done it?

Let’s start with something more tractable, and be clear on what it is to take over a horse.

A natural theory is that to take over a horse is to be the arbiter of everything about the horse —to be the one deciding the horse’s every motion.

But you probably don’t actually want to control the horse’s every motion, because the horse’s own ability to move itself is a large part of its value-add. Flaccid horse mass isn’t that helpful, not even if we throw in the horse’s physical strength to move itself according to your commands, and some sort of magical ability for you to communicate muscle-level commands to it. If you were in command of the horse’s every muscle, it would fall over. (If you directed its cellular processes too, it would die; if you controlled its atoms, you wouldn’t even have a dead horse.)

Information and computing capacity

The reason this isn’t so good is that balancing and maneuvering a thousand pounds of fast-moving horse flesh balanced on flexible supports is probably hard for you, at least via an interface of individual muscles, at least without more practice being a horse. I think for two reasons:

Lack of information e.g. about exactly where every part of the horse’s body is and where its hoofs are touching the ground how hard
Lack of computing power to dedicate to calculating desired horse muscle motions from the above information and your desired high level horse behavior

(Even if you have these things, you don’t obviously know how to use them to direct the horse well, but you can probably figure this out in finite time, so it doesn’t seem like a really fundamental problem.)

Tentative claim: holding more levers is good for you only insofar as you have the information and computing capacity to calculate which directions you should want those levers pushed.

So, you seem to be getting a lot out of the horse and various horse subcomponents making their own decisions about steering and balance and breathing and snorting and mitosis and where electrons should go. That is, you seem to be getting a lot out of not being in control of the horse. In fact so far it seems like the more you are in control of the hors...

Phasma Felis

Phasma Felis