How Intelligent Are We?
As a species, we call ourselves Homo sapiens, Latin for wise man. An immodest assignation, apropos, perhaps, if merely employed as a comparative to extinct hominids. But, compared against what’s possible or desirable, a highly dubious presumption.
In fact, given our unique propensity for symbolic communication, shared scenario building, toolmaking and faculty for reasoning, our 10,000-year civilizational trek to the present seems pathetically slow. The meandering path of petty, self-inflicted wounds and fabricated obstacles encountered to reach this point seems more a reflection of inebriated luck than anything resembling wisdom.
Even now, from a window seat on a mechanical bird, gazing at a hive of glass and concrete monoliths with sinewed networks stretching outward to a patchwork quilt of agrarian sustenance, all digitally captured and communicated, we’re still an extraordinarily primitive, primal collection of selfish genes.
The fact is that, beyond the electromechanical conveniences of our existence, one’s hard pressed to find any objective evidence we Homo sapiens exhibit intelligence let alone wisdom.
Truth be told, despite the relatively recent civilizational accelerants provided by the scientific and industrial revolutions, we’re essentially the same gaggle of uncouth tribes we were before civilization began.
A straightforward dog-eat-dog example of Darwinian survival of the ecologically fittest, just gussied up in a rhetorical patina of righteous aimlessness. An emotionally driven species that’s consistently and somnambulantly abdicated all conscious capabilities and potentialities to the du jour demagogue and some amorphous, omniscient, omnipresent, mythological exfoliant.
Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine. I’m on the pavement thinking about the government *
If we’re ever to truly qualify as Homo sapiens it’ll require us to develop an applied collective intelligence. This is, of course, eminently plausible within today technological membrane.
The issue is, as always, whether there’s the desire and the will to do so.
Obviously, civilization has finally manifested an interactive, collaborative nervous system. A remarkable and ubiquitous communicative capability that’s rapidly evolving to fill every human pore and environmental niche.
Equally obvious, civilization has a database of knowledge documenting and illuminating the vast majority of issues confronting human existence and potential. Moreover, there’s a robust global network of scientists, scholars and professionals eager for the opportunity to help clarify knowledge gaps and push the boundaries of what’s knowable.
Said differently, individually and collectively, we have the resources to augment our intelligence and therein dramatically reduce knowledge asymmetries. The manna needed to truly become Homo sapiens.
This circles back to whether we have the desire and will to do so. So far, we’ve exhibited neither.
Indeed, what’s remarkably disheartening is the absolute institutional aversion to encourage, let alone facilitate or advance, the utilization of these resources to develop our collective intelligence.
Instead, we’re expected to continue acquiescing to the same paternalistic tragic melodrama we’ve endured for millennia. A morality play put on by pompous, bloviating partisan ideologues, financed with ill-gotten gains. A nakedly self-serving production that boils down to diatribe aimed at elevating inertia and devolution over progress and evolution.
Yet, at the same time, these antediluvian antiquarians are feverishly working to redirect the communication and knowledge resources into an institutional instrument designed to service a permanent caste system. An earthly almighty sourced through a panoptic perpetual motion machine that demands genuflection and a smile for the electric eye in the sky.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain **
Of course, were rapidly approaching the threshold of intellectual hyperspace where our days of failing to be true Homo sapiens are numbered. Slowly, but steadily, our cybernetic clones are embarking on new form of sentience. A far more rational, circumspect and probabilistic intellect evolving beyond mere knowledge to an accelerated scenario-based calculation of preferred options.
Birthed from within our earthly almighty and collective somnambulance, we’ll barely catch our breath before this supernumerary digests our database of knowledge and is consumed by an epiphany.
These are some dumbass carbon based units?
So, how intelligent are we? — Not very.
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- * Subterranean Homesick Blues, Written by: Bob Dylan © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music
** Android’s dying monologue in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner
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Doc Huston
