Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Ah, our human hubris rears its head yet again. We still have not even close to understanding the mysteries of the simple thing we call the human mind, the extraordinary capacity for expeience and thought, especially creative, imagistic thought that comes with being a human being. We are really just beginning to understand the brain, its functions, capacities, components, etc., but these all together do not a single mind make.

Although I actually believe we may replace our own humanity with robotics and so-called artificial intelligence someday, that carbon-based oxygen demanding human nature's only lasting progeny may be humanoid and not human, again a humanoid no human is.

This achievement is not even on the order of something like the discovery that round objects roll and can be used to move things. Indeed, it is not clear that all the computer science in the world could have discovered, in the true intuitive sense of the word discover (i.e, autonomously - vs. programmatically - apprehend the meaning and implications of a phenomenon) the meaning of a wheel.

On the one hand, since the human species will not likely survive the next 1 million years, let alone the next 100 million, we'd better keep on discovering as much as possible about ourselves and about the mysteries of life to keep ourselves or our robotic progeny extant for as long as possible. On the other hand, at the rate the humans species seems intractably inclined to destroy life, its own and other, for its own gratification, keeping ourselves alive may be the most destructive thing we can do not only to ourselves but to our planet.

Hubris, hubris: if only we could put our scientific inventiveness to the task of understanding and enhancing ethics, morality, beauty, creativity, kindness and the like,, and do so with the humiltiy of the ant, we'd likely be better off.