UTILIZING THE TOOLS WE HAVE TO EVOLVE

UTILIZING THE TOOLS WE HAVE TO EVOLVE

By Ted Bailey

Facing the possibility of human extinction is, in fact, a possibility that most of us refuse to acknowledge now, yet COVID is everywhere.  Reality seems to falter with humans until disaster is upon us, a distinct human characteristic which may be the very reason we have failed to kill COVID so far.

What can we do? 

Human evolution seems stuck in a phase just above the caveman level.  The reason:  the slow speed of the creation of knowledge.  Man creates knowledge by writing it down, dies, and relies on other humans to add more knowledge with the hope that some of these humans can take the knowledge and make usable items to promote the evolutionary development of humanity.

 

The unfortunate reality to this sequence is the short life span of intelligent people.  They simply do not have time to create more useful knowledge.  Less than twenty percent of the population have any real ideas or intelligence capable of producing useful products in the first place.  This is known as the 80-20 Rule and is predominant in economic theory but applies to everything involving humans.

Progress comes from taking knowledge and producing something out of it.  MIT seems to be the only university in the United States that, not only promotes this line of thinking, but actually requires it.  The way of life at MIT promotions the concept of taking knowledge and quickly turning it into something useful.  Surprisingly, no other university in America teaches this. 

Shocking?

How many of you have degrees from a state university that can identify with what I’m saying?

Consequently, human evolution is at a crawl due to the short life spans of humans.  Humans create knowledge, put it to use in real things in the world, and pass the information along to others to use again and again.   The slow rate of this process is the reason for the slow evolution of mankind.

There is a cure for this dilemma:  thinking computers.

Up to this time, humans have ambivalently sought to build a computer that is self-aware and speaks to us like a human, but would that be a disadvantage?  Wouldn’t that make the computer just as susceptible as any other human?

 

What we need is a huge number of computers, regardless of their awareness, that think and show us how to make products, break the death barrier, lead countries, fight wars, stop wars, cure cancer, and evolve better.  If it destroys all humans, then we deserve to be superseded by computers with robotic appendages.  Bottom line. 

Darwinism.

We have the computers now to accomplish that very goal.  It’s how we connect them and program them that matters.

Shouldn’t we place more credence in the tools we have at hand?  Linking the computers in decent neural nets of knowledge to expand who we are for the future is the obvious way forward.