One can also say that society as a whole is itself an intelligent agent,
albeit a rather dumb one compared to humans themselves. As you wrote, we
evolved intelligence to enable communications about the environment and
that led to our civilization culture and religion. I think that certain
brain structures evolved that makes us value authority which led to
religion, but that this was important to get our civilization started.
It may well be that Neanderthals were more intelligent than us but that
their social dynamics were simpler. If they subjectively would value a
certain habit/dogma/ authority less and would be less hesitant to do
things differently, listen to someone else instead of the person usually
regarded as the authority etc. without that feeling like blasphemy, then
that could make them better scientists today, but that would also
prevent them from ever being able to build the society that we have
today.
Since the start of our civilization, our brain size has dropped
significantly:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-human-brain-has-been-getting-smaller-since-the-stone-age
Scientists studying this have gone to great lengths to downplay the
possibility that this may have reduced our intelligence, but it's
difficult to not assume that this is what happened:
"So although there was a reduction in skull size — and possibly
intelligence — human cooperation grew, cultivating greater collective
wisdom. A few social smaller brains can surely outwit one lonely large
noggin."
But, of course, this was a trade for raw intelligence for powerful
social dynamics which may have reduced the overall intelligence of the
entire system. It's likely that people today are a lot less intelligent
due to the brain having become susceptible to religious zeal that allows
us to blindly support Trump, Hitler or Stalin than our immediate
ancestors who lived 50,000 years ago.
As a result of all this, We're now enslaved by our capitalist system by
our own tendency to religiously adherence to whatever system we grow up
in. We find it very difficult to stop using fossil fuels. So, one can
say that the carbon burning part of our economy, which is a very low
complexity system, is holding ourselves captive. If we are eventually
able to free ourselves from this system, it would have taken ourselves a
massive amount of effort given that it was technically very simple to do
starting 40 years ago.
Then if in the future more complex issues threatening our existence
start to arise, then it's pretty much guaranteed that we'll die out. I
think that takeover by AI will doom us, not because AI will be much
smarter than us, but because the AI taking over from us will be much
dumber than us. Just like in case of global warming, we'll fail to act
in time to regulate new technologies that will threaten our existence if
these technologies lead to lots of short term benefits. Self replicating
machines will lead to such enormous economic benefits that we can forget
about being able to regulate this technology. The end result will be
that our civilization will be taken over by a machine civilization of
which the most intelligent components may be dumber than the average
insect.
Saibal
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