Interesting that you look at the continued failure of humans as a reason to continue to depend on them without outside help…

Are you familiar with forest ecosystems? You have many groups of trees, connected by network of fungi called mycelia. The mycela areused as a network, to ferry messages and nutrients between the trees. The trees get along fine with members of their in-group, generally family members, but will try to poison any competition outside it.

However, that sort of nepotism is obviously a really shitty move not just on moral grounds, but for the sake of overall forest diversity. So, the mycelia just diverts the poison and otherwise continues to facilitate a harmonious environment between the trees.

Trees and mycelia have evolved an economy far more complex than anything humans can rival. They can deal with equations many times more complex than our brains can even touch on! The amount of information they can store (in their DNA — brains are not a prerequisite to memory or even logic) is dizzying.

Now. Do you know why humans rely on stereotypes so much? It’s because our brains can only keep track of about 300 people at a time. We can’t store information about every person in China, so we hold an image of a single Chinese person representing them all instead.

How can humans possibly be kind and fair to one another, when we can’t even quantify one another as individuals beyond that sad number?

We need mycelia, and we need them badly.