But enhanced feedback methods can accelerate learning about more mundane behaviours. For example, if you are learning to take basketball shots, augmented feedback in the form of "You were 3 inches off to the left" can help you learn faster and reach a higher skill level quicker. Perhaps the most powerful example of an augmented feedback loop is the development of writing, which allowed us to take language and experiences, and make them permanent, solidifying it against the ravages of time, space and memory.
Thanks to feedback we can become more than simple programs with simple reflexes, and develop more complex responses to the environment. Feedback allows animals like us to follow a purpose. Tim Lewis's mechanical bird might seem simple, but in terms of intelligence it has more in common with us than with nearly all other machines that humans have built. Engines or clocks might be incredibly sophisticated, but until they are able to gather their own data about the environment they remain trapped in fixed patterns.
Feedback loops, on the other hand, beginning with the senses but extending out across time and many individuals, allow us to self-construct, letting us travel to places we don't have the instructions for beforehand, and letting us build on the history of our actions. In this way humanity pulls itself up by its own bootstraps.
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