I was sitting in my car in the Costco parking lot, not going anywhere yet, and I had a strange thought. I looked through the windshield at all of it - the carts, the people, the slow crawl of cars hunting for a space, the man in the orange vest steering a long snake of carts back toward the doors - and I thought: I am computing right now. All of this is information, and I am processing it.
Nothing was happening. That was the point.
Consider what that “nothing” actually contained. Yann LeCun likes to put numbers on it. The largest language models are trained on around ten trillion words, essentially all the quality text on the internet, a quantity it would take a human being 170,000 years to read. And a four-year-old child, he calculates, has already taken in roughly fifty times more than that through her eyes alone, in four years, just by looking around. Vision is a firehose. Language is a straw. That is not a knock on the machines. It is a fact about volume and kind. I was drinking from the firehose without trying, without it registering as effort at all.
And I was not merely seeing the lot. I was reading it. Barbara Tversky argues that thought is built out of space and motion, that we think by tracking bodies moving through the world. So I was running trajectories. That cart will drift left. That reversing SUV has not seen the woman with the toddler. That space will open in about four seconds. I was operating a physics engine and a theory of other people’s minds at the same time, forecasting the next few seconds of a dozen strangers at once, and I was calling it sitting in the car.
This is what living things do. To be alive is to predict, to model what comes next well enough to act before it arrives. And prediction is compression. You cannot keep every photon, so you keep the gist, the pattern that lets you guess the rest. The entire lot, reduced on the fly to “safe to back out in a moment.” That reduction is the intelligence. The throwing away is the thinking.
César Hidalgo has a set of photographs in Why Information Grows that I have never gotten out of my head. A man selling handmade shoes: processing information in the form of shoes. People at an outdoor restaurant: exchanging conversations and packets of information. A man asleep in a chair: an information processor in a resting state. A family at dinner: sharing messages while consuming energy. Once you have seen them you cannot unsee them, and my parking lot was that same series, running live. The cart man was logistics made flesh. The couple arguing by their trunk were trading packets. The man reclined asleep in his truck was an information processor at rest. And the warehouse itself, that enormous ribbed box, was crystallized knowledge, every truss a piece of structural engineering somebody worked out once and froze into steel.
This is the thing LeCun keeps reaching for with his toddler and his byte counts, and it was Hidalgo, of all people, who finally made me feel it while I sat perfectly still. A resting human being is doing something so large and so dimensional that we do not even have the manners to call it work. We call it nothing. We call it waiting. The most ordinary moment of the most ordinary day is a staggering act of computation, and we are so good at it that it has gone invisible to us.
I started the car. I pulled out of the space, clearing the woman and her toddler by a wide and automatic margin. I had just watched myself think, and the setting could not have been less remarkable. A Tuesday. A Costco. A cart or two. All of it information, and all of it me.