Are we smart or wise or all this is far-fetched
Human beings are the smartest species on earth. But do we have a limit. What percentage of our brains can we really use, how much are we supposed to use and how far can we push ourselves before we hit the limit. If there is a limit how far is it from the optimal performance? Okay then how smart can we really be? They say Solomon was the wisest of his time, was he smart too? “A smart person will give you smart answers but a wise person will ask you smart questions”
Yesterday my doctor told me to take a rest. I should not read too much (it’s good to read he said but there is a limit to it). I inquired about that and also about high blood pressure after running some tests. I was told stress and too much thinking could result to what I was experiencing. Now the list of things I have to avoid grows! Stress, don’t think I have, thinking too much ooh I definitely do and I ain’t planning to stop, I am already a junkie. I am taking a break now and so instead of taking knowledge in I guess I will have to take what I think is knowledge, out.
In the christian and Islamic faith, God created earth and placed human beings in charge of it. We were supposed to continue in His creation. Boy creating we did. From the roman empires to the British empire and today’s financial empires, the grate China wall was build, we invented machines to cruise the oceans, travel the earth and fly in the air and now we want to do it in vacuums. Then we created the internet, we discovered penicillin and other inventions like how to print our organs. Discoveries that have or will helped us advance our health. But that wasn’t enough we needed to kill each other. So we perfected this art too, we created swords, guns, mines, tankers and missiles but that was not killing enough so we had to go a step further. We developed nukes to whose causatum is everyone looses . In the 2000 years we have lived in this world, killing is one of the things we are really good at and it never stops. Now North Korean leader who doesn't have to face politics that stagnates and downtrends progress in the rest of the world, thinks the best way to use his time and freedom is to develop weapons that can get to other parts of the world instead of finding cure for cancer or at least provide electricity to more that half of the country. So the smart brains in the country are put to no better good besides killing.
One of the yardsticks of human creation has been technology and we have done a lot of good in it. God says we are His children so I say we are gods in our own rights, going by the Swahili saying “mtoto wa nyoka ni nyoka” (the young one of a snake is a snake). And like the father we had to also do a creation in our own image. Talk of Asimo, IBM Watson, Alexa, Google Ai, Siri and the rest.
We are building technology that no doubt will outsmart us. We build them to be our servants but will they? That is a question we humans can really answer best.If some of us don’t live by the rules of our faiths how do we expect a more intelligent creation of us to play by our rules. Being intelligent means this to our subordinates; we can kill them for food and that ain’t murder, make them pull our cuts, hunt them and sell their horns for profit, confine them in a location so that we can have fun looking at them and all the rest and more importantly make them work for us. There whole existence is to serve us.
Because our smartness is limited we build technologies that can go that extra mile for us. But taking a lesson from most of our faiths, we have to put a limit to how smart they really can get or form a network of smartness that human beings get to be at the epicenter and thus in control. To use a machine learning figurative language, we have to have humans at some “nodes” or “neurons” of this “neural-network”.Human beings are intelligent not because one of us is but because we combine our intelligence just like the brain optimists its neurons to solve problems collectively. In conclusion I think we get to be intelligent by working with more intelligent technology we build and by being wise on how we control this smartness. We not only have to be smart but wise on how we use our smartness.
Phew! that was long. I cant go on a rant now.