Humanility

“We’ve got no power, Captain.” 

   Montgomery Scott, Enterprise engineer

        Some years ago, folks digging under the skin of France in a cave called Menez-Dregan, discovered what was apparently a 500,000 year-old fire pit.  The find was significant because it was twice as old as any previously known use of fire.  The jury is still out on the origins of this fire pit, but the age of the site plus a number of other clues suggest a startling conclusion.  The fire in question was probably not made by our clever sapiens ancestors but instead by one of our predecessors.  Homo erectus perhaps, that evolutionary discard.  So maybe we were not the first ones to manipulate fire; another species did it first.  Our forebears were perhaps just good thieves.

        That makes one more nudge from the center of the universe for us.

        Our sun is an ordinary star, our planet is at the edge of a common whorl, our ancestors had fur, we behave unwittingly, share most of our genes with bananas, and probably did not even invent fire. 

        The fall of the ape from the apex.

        That dig revealed a diminished past…and who knows what humiliations the future will hold.  It is a fictional given that one day we will create our own replacements, some superduper descendent of the Web, let‘s say, that will gain awareness and start to delete us, the way we are extincting so many other species. 

             

        Come to think of it, even if all human beings vanished right now, the natural world would barely notice, the universe hardly twitch.  Even our own technology would continue on by itself for some time…uncaring, unweeping.  Most electronic devices would go on for many hours.  There was a news report of a doomed Learjet that traveled for 4 hours and 1400 miles on its own after all the humans on board died.  Computer networks could continue for days or even weeks doing their computations.  Lights would stay lit until power plants ran down, months in some cases, maybe years.  The online world might even continue to expand and grow and evolve for who knows how long.

        Shrinking past, dwindling future.  A moment of true humility about the fragile place of the human animal in the world might be in order.

        A kind of humanility.

 

        It might even be the case that our rationality, consciousness, intelligence, and wisdom do not really amount to all that much in the end.  There may be other roads to awareness, other paths to mastery…even technological ones.  Current arguments against the ascent of the machine suggest that computation – no matter how sophisticated – can never lead to consciousness because the first merely transcribes while the second transcends.  But who knows?  

        Transcendence might very well be a natural effect of complex systems.  The notion that no other creature – natural or artificial – could possibly be as clever as we are may be pure bozocentrism.  Whales, insects, and even homo erectus might have something to say about that.  Machines too someday.  All it would take is a bit of emergence.

        Emergence occurs when one system evolves to overcome the rules of the one in which it is embedded.  With our culture, language, and technology, humans have emerged from the biocosm to create our gizmotic world.  New innovations – should we happen to survive ourselves – will do doubt emerge us further from the animal world and its evolutionary constraints.  So perhaps our machines will find their own way to burst through the human bubble, not as a result of our plans but by systemic evolution.

        When that happens, prepare yourself for humanility on a grand scale.

        Then what are we to make of that irritating little fire pit?  Does it tell the tale of our aggressive ingenuity or imply our inevitable doom?  What does it say about our future and the destiny of our technology?  A reporter in the 1940s asked Mao Zedong what impact he thought the French Revolution had on his own Communist revolution 150 years later.  His answer was...it is too soon to tell.  A coy reply perhaps but also shrewd.  Maybe it is the same with the impact of that fire pit half a million years ago regarding questions like what it means and where we are headed and what comes next.

        Maybe it is always just too damn soon to tell.