Why Humans Are All Hype: World’s Top Animals Weigh In
Over and over, I reiterate the need for broadening one’s perspective when thinking about self-driving cars, or AI, or the potential of technology in general. But my measly blog can’t stop the hordes of people who refuse to turn on their critical thinking, and instead continue to berate and denounce autonomous vehicles for their failure to mimic or outperform human drivers in conventional traffic scenarios.
They have trouble with snow. They have trouble telling the difference between a plastic bag and an animal. They’re scared of bicyclists. All of these observations assume the future of transportation has to solve all our conventional traffic problems, and do so in a similar fashion to how humans solve them.
Such a position is historically idiotic, and I’ve explained that repeatedly on my blog. But — successful explanations require an audience who wants to listen, and frankly, many folks out there just don’t want to fucking listen. So this post? This one’s for you, because it doesn’t require you to think from the perspective of an artificial intelligence program at all. Instead, you just have to think like nature’s previous quantum leap: humans.
This is the analogy I think you need; the one that illustrates just how stupid and useless and unsuccessful the human race would have sounded on paper, had someone gone back to the origin of our species and asked other animals whether they thought we’d be a threat.
I’ve just got one question: if these humans are such a big deal, howcome I’ve never seen one of them? Supposedly they walk on dry land… that’s cute. Inhabitable land is what, 30% of the earth’s surface? And it’s exactly that: surface. To say my neighbors and I own 70% of the earth is conservative considering we live in three dimensions of space, while people are stuck with two. Humans are just the latest of nature’s pet projects running around in a safe little lab. Toss one of them into the water and see what happens. I know my species has seen it thousands of times before.. nature loves to conjure up hare-brained experiments like this. Flavor of the month, if you ask me.
Oh, and the dying! Isn’t it utter self-defeat to lose strength and durability as you age? So what, you breed offspring, the offspring get healthy, and then… the offspring waste their potential by defending the older generation? Here’s an idea: learn how to molt! It boggles the mind to imagine a species who might actually believe that getting weaker as you age is a recipe for success.
Yeah I don’t know, I’d love to take this species seriously but…. come on. They’re sacks of fat that almost seem put on this earth for me to snack on. Like, I must have done something right in a past life to be gifted with a bunch of humans running around for my enjoyment.
They run slow. They climb poorly. They fight like… well, they don’t fight. I don’t want to be a brute about it, but give me any argument for humans, and I’ll respond by smacking one in the head with my paw and knocking it unconscious. They’re smart? They have advanced communication? Great. Let them communicate their way to a tiny island where they’ll be safe from me and my brothers’ appetites.
No, I don’t consider humans a threat at all. To who, me? No. Not me, not any species. I’ve seen them ambushed and overpowered by superior hunters time and time again. If they were a threat, they’d know how to manipulate their environment like I can with camouflage. They’d have panoramic sight and independent eyes like me — christ, imagine eyeballs that could only look forward and focus on one subject. Isn’t that survival 101? Be aware of your entire surroundings? These humans are sitting ducks by design.
Plus, they don’t get to make mistakes. Listen: you go through life in the wild, you’re gonna screw up at some point. Some predator is going to get the drop on you eventually, so obviously, you’d want to be able to grow back your tail if you lost it. But these things… you lop off one of their appendages, and they bleed out. Whatever advantage humans supposedly have, it’s more than negated by how fragile and unaware they are.
You ask me if these humans are a real threat. Well, can they fly? No. Are they quicker than me? No. Very well then; we’ve established they pose no direct threat. That much is surely obvious. I live in a world they can’t reach.
Now, maybe they could “function” as a species so long as my friends and I allowed them. And I see no reason not to allow it, since they’re just one more source of sustenance for flies — as long as humans exist, we’ll exist to feed off them. I won’t speak to the scarcity of their diet, but it goes without saying that they’ve got a hard time ahead of them if they can’t break down anything into food before actually having to consume it.
Nevertheless: you didn’t ask if they could function as a species — you asked if they were a threat. Absolutely not. I can’t think of a situation where my species would feel threatened, but if we ever did, it’s worth remembering that humans aren’t just slow from a locomotion perspective; they’re also slow to breed and slow to develop. At any given moment, we flies could band together and rain massive destruction upon them. Anytime. There are just too many of us for humans to overcome. But again, it would never come to that, because they pose no threat whatsoever.
Okay, did that do anything for you? Are you grasping the advantage of intelligence? Humans have rarely secured a foothold of dominance over another species by beating that species at their own game. And what these animals could never have imagined was that we’d invent seemingly alien, even god-like ways to manipulate the environment to our advantage.
We never developed gills or cold blood; instead we invented ships, and compressed gas, and propulsion systems. We never bred our way into bear-like physical strength; instead, we invented levers and weapons. We never evolved hunting tricks like panoramic vision or camouflage; instead, we just cut down the damn forests altogether and disrupted the entire ecosystem. We never learned to fly; instead, we invented planes. The first human couldn’t fly. The humans of today can go into outer fucking space.
Note also that we didn’t need to solve for everything. Can a bear still kill a human? Definitely. We just solved for bears to the point that going any further was no longer useful. A few dozen bear-induced deaths a year is nothing to our race. The fact that humans still can’t swat a fly is a minor annoyance, and if it were more than that, we’d invent something to take care of it. We didn’t get where we are today by outperforming every other organism in every facet. We got here by putting our collective brainy foot up the ass of everything that got in the way of where we wanted to go.
So it goes for autonomous cars. You say they can’t drive in snow? Recognize that within a few years, they’ll likely be solving for it in ways your brain could never hope to match. And if they don’t, it won’t be because the technology has stumbled and withered away from existence — it will be because the technology is busy solving other problems so influential by comparison that the idea of snow driving sounds like a cheap parlor trick. Cool camo, chameleon… my friends are truly impressed. Now eat this dead cricket I dropped in your cage and go dance on that plastic rock for our entertainment.
