Evolving Intelligence: A Historical Perspective

Humans, for a long time, have thought they were unique in their intelligence. It set them apart from other animals and allowed them to conquer the world. Today, we use our intelligence to create technology that can carry multiple people across the world in merely hours out destroy a significant portion of the planet with the push of a button. However, our technology is not increasing at a contact rate. One thousand years ago, the level of sophistication in the human race was high in the Ottoman empire but nowhere else. We were fighting with swords and had only recently invented the longbow. Six hundred years ago we had invented cannons and were using concussion induced projectiles. Only one hundred years ago we had invented the lightbulb,

It is not our intellect that keeps us alive, but our ability to adapt. Take the Neanderthal. It was a humanoid species that lived with our ancestors about 300,000 years ago and went extinct about 30,000 years ago. They dominated much of central europe, and hunted large animals during the ice age. Their barrel chests and huge stature protected them from the bitter cold. Their DNA differed from Homo Sapiens by only 0.12%. In fact, they had even bigger brains than the modern human and outrank us by fluid intelligence standards. However, they were missing a key part of the brain, called the Parietal lobe, which assists in social cognition. As an Oxford study

This is clearly seen in Terminator, Age of Ultron, and in the Matrix. Although the movies themselves are very different, the theme is the same: The robots turn on their human masters and a bloodbath follows. Even pre modern societies warned against artificial intelligence. In an old Jewish tale called “The Golem”, a rabbi in a village created a golem out of clay to defend the village. When a small force attacks the village, the golem massacres them and is thereafter corrupted by the idea of violence. After time has passed, the golem destroyed the village and killed everyone except the rabbi, so he could be forever tormented because he had been the downfall of everyone he