From Cave People to Space Farers

 

Image generated using AI (OpenAI / DALL·E), prompted by the author.

Mankind has traversed a fascinating journey from its shaky beginnings in Africa many hundreds of thousands of years ago to the present times of total planetary dominance. From its hunter-gatherer days to its more settled times as agriculturists, and from the dawn of the earliest urban civilisations to the outstanding achievements of modern science that gave it mastery over  land, sea and space, its journey has been an unending saga of incremental and sometimes explosive progress. Mankind has come a long way from coexisting with mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers to having to contend with the spectre of  placing its destiny in the hands of autonomously thinking machines.

​It is a fascinating journey of the evolution and rise of a living species from a state of  gritty and brutal struggle for survival in a cruel and unforgiving world to reach a stage where one world is not enough for the ambitions of mankind, which now seeks to be a multi-planetary species. The ascent of mankind is a  unique phenomenon in a universe which is home to billions upon billions of galaxies and planetary systems. If there are life forms more advanced than mankind somewhere who have a more amazing story to tell, one may defer to them, but till such time that we know of such a thing, we have to marvel at what these two-legged animals who walk upright on a rocky planet have achieved in a very short period of time.

​Intrinsic to mankind’s nature has been a questioning and inquisitive disposition that made it try to understand and possibly master and tame phenomena that were easily beyond its pale. It learnt to study the life cycle of edible plants and learnt to grow and harvest them. It tamed and domesticated animals to help plough land  efficiently and pull wheeled wagons across vast stretches of land. It learned to build large boats that could cross oceans, powered by the wind, allowing the discovery of new lands, enabling trade and the exchange of ideas. Collectively, they used knowledge as the frontier of growth, advancing their civilization to accomplish that the planet earth abounds with-motorcars, aeroplanes, computers, modern medical science, space travel, computers and of course, AI.

​The world owes as much to collective effort, as it does to the mad, maverick genius of scientists like Newton and Einstein, intrepid sea-farers like Columbus and Magellan, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, the first astronauts and cosmonauts, industrialists like Henry Ford and Rockefeller and the harbingers of the technology revolution that has put mankind on a trajectory whose path there is no way of predicting.

We may make Earth a utopia where every individual gets to lead a happy, healthy and fulfilled life, or we may become an interstellar species, all thanks to AI. On the other hand, AI may decide to make slaves of us or totally exterminate us. We could also see a war of survival between AI gone rogue and human beings giving their all in an epic struggle to save their species from thinking machines turned into Frankenstein’s monsters.

​Humans have reached where they have reached because they are a unique species of life. We adapt, think out of the box, and forever strive to push the envelope, consequently notching up the most marvelous of achievements. Surely, we will not surrender our humanity to artificial beings we brought into existence.