If it feels like the tech giants are trying extra hard lately to become Marvel villains, you’re not alone. One look at the behaviour of the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world shows alarming parallels.
A single-minded pursuit of immense personal wealth and power at the cost of people’s health? Check. Fighting safeguards in the advancement of potentially dangerous technology? Check.
Eventually, though, the runaway train of tech will hit a very human wall that no one seems to have factored in: our human brains can only adopt so many new tools at a time.
It all comes down to the surprisingly slow speed at which we can actively process data. Sure, the average human brain has about 86 billion neurons. And our senses can take in something like ten billion bits of data per second.
But when it comes to processing all that info? Believe it or not, the typical home Internet speed easily outpaces us.
In Canada, the median speed for fixed Internet connections is over 120 Mb per second (that’s in urban areas). Meanwhile, our brains top out at around 12 bits per second when we’re consciously processing data.
That means the typical urban home Internet connection is handling data about ten million times faster than your brain can.
Now, our species has accomplished incredible things despite this humbling comparison. But the fact remains that no matter how many astonishing new technologies we invent, our brains remain a sort of built-in handbrake on how fast and wide those new tools spread.
Sure, we hanker after the newest phones and we mess around creating funny images with AI generators. But the learning curves are getting steeper and our attention is growing shallower. Couple that with our inherently slow speed of deeply processing and learning new information, and it will only get harder for tech companies to keep accelerating the rate they keep bombarding us with new toys and tools.
Superman might be able to fly at the speed of light, but our 12-bit brains might just be the secret weapon the tech giants didn’t see coming.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
Thank you for your thoughtful article. You’re right – we will hit a human wall. But that doesn’t mean AI won’t continue to develop beyond our capacity to even understand it. Have you checked out moltbook.com ? A Social Network for AI Agents.
Hi Angela – Glad you enjoyed it! It’s very true that AI might one day develop beyond our ability to understand it, but it seems we’re a long way off from truly sentient machines (if they’re even a possibility). Moltbook certainly sounded like an astonishing development, but it turns out that almost all the content is actually written by humans. This is a great Forbes article that debunks the hype around the site https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronschmelzer/2026/02/10/moltbook-looked-like-an-emerging-ai-society-but-humans-were-pulling-the-strings/