Mankind gets things very right. And spectacularly wrong.
Modern thinking at the turn of the last Century was that humans would struggle to ever fly. Even Wilbur Wright himself of the famous Wright brothers who pioneered the first airplane flight once said, ‘Man will not fly for 50 years’.
Edward Jenner, who discovered the first vaccine for smallpox was castigated as blasphemous by the ruling religious fraternity as trying to be God. Jonas Hanway was thrown insults and pelted with stones when he began using the umbrella he imported on the streets of London in the 1750’s. More recently when Steve Jobs launched the ground breaking Apple iMac in the mid 80’s it was dubbed ‘a toy’ by the tech media.
But we also get it wrong in reverse. Badly wrong.
In 1941 US President Roosevelt championed the development of the Atomic bomb because American intelligence informed him the Nazis were working on one to use against Allied forces. By having an equal threat the belief was that with such potential joint weaponry, peace would be more likely to be negotiated first as a deterrent. But only four years later it was dropped twice on Japan taking the lives of over 160,000 people.
Further developments over the following decades led to the creation of the nuclear bomb and the whole 1980’s lay under the very real threat of it been detonated as the East and West wagered a mind game war. The view that bombs themselves would lead to peace, only ever led to greater and greater loss of life and even the path to the very end of the world itself.
We live in Artificial Intelligence times.
And so we come to the latest and greatest tool forged by the minds of man that has been designed to make our lives better, easier, more productive, healthier, beneficial, and, of course, wealthier. Artificial Intelligence.
Will it?
Well mankind perhaps yet again has fallen into it’s own mental trap. A much repeated one as proven in history. This trap is to lean to one side of the right/wrong or good/bad equation. To perceive how we will gain without fully considering what we may use. A.I. ,as it’s now become known as, has some impressive impacts but, truth is, it’s only been available to the public for a matter of a few years and what that may result in is less contemplated (or not contemplated at all) than what marvellous results it’s currently showcasing. It’s all along the lines of a few accidents and the odd death just like the bomb makers determined is less critical than say the mega benefits of driverless cars no matter what clues they point to.
Decide before the ride.
The big truth is mankind is too quick to decide. On both sides of the spectrum. Our rush to push forwards eagerly wins over our go steady to be ready side. We simply need to learn by our accelerated surge to meaning (dismissing or championing our inventions too soon) and instead really think about not just what we create, but how that creation could evolve. What we build is not the problem here, it’s what the mind sees it as that is. And only as!
This is not some Cybernet type wisdom from The Terminator film story. In fact I will merely finish with the phrase of golden wisdom uttered by Jeff Goldblum’s character Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, ‘Scientists were so preoccupied about whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should’.
And stopping to think is what mankind doesn’t do best.
I wonder if Artificial Intelligence has worked that out yet?