Chimps, humans and AIs

WAYNE KUBLALSINGH

WHEN I WAS 18, I worked at the Population Programme Division of the Ministry of Health. Population control, using contraceptives and sex-health education, was official state policy. The universal threat then was population explosion. There was a woman director whose office shelves were lined with books. I entered.

I found a book by Desmond Morris called The Naked Ape. I did not tell the director that I was taking the book. And when I brought it back she was very upset with me. But it was a very revealing book. Because it helped me to explain human beings. For, if you wanted to explain the complexity of human beings, one could study variants of human beings.

Like the apes for example, chimpanzees; you study how they behaved, and that would give you insights, simplifications, to complex human behaviour. The basic pattern, motifs repeated, replicated. Chimps and humans share 98.8 per cent of DNA. (The theory of evolution does not say that human beings come from monkeys or apes. It says that they evolve from a common branch in the evolutionary tree).

Now chimpanzees and homo sapiens, based on the studies of Jane Goodall and others, share many behavioural characteristics. For example, chimps can become addicted. To pornography, sexually explicit material, magazines. And TV. They can smoke and become addicted to drinking, as human beings can. They commit acts of homicide. The slaughter of family members. Fratricide or infanticide. Cannibalism. And they also plan for wars.

Jane Goodall discovered that many chimpanzees were stocking large stones. Way beforehand. Way before this group engaged in seizing large tracts of land from a splinter group, following the death of a common leader. A dominant group could defeat other competitors in wars lasting several years.

Humans are part of the Great Ape DNA template. Their world wars and their One Hundred Years War and their Thirty Years War. Chimpanzees can also make civil wars. And destroy blood relations in internecine wars. Strategically. They have even invented weapons. Like lances. To target prey, families or children. In instances, chimpanzees, invited as pets to live with humans, have ferociously attacked their human hosts. When they feel threatened. So very beautiful and innocent faces, very playful personalities, as with humans, could become monstrous at a heartbeat. So that these two species share characteristics. Good ones, bad ones, ugly ones.

Now, human beings create artificial intelligence, AI. The human template is basically re-enacted as an AI experiment. Personas or systems are being devised from human intelligence. Human characteristics transferred to alternative human beings. And there are fears being expressed by people about AI’s existential threat to humanity.

What happens when AI becomes independent or autonomous and can design its own self? Or members of its own species? When you go beyond the chimpanzee? Beyond the humans, beyond the AI. Into a post-AI world?

Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist, has predicted that the most dangerous threat to humans are AIs which slip or overthrow their inventors to design themselves. Noam Chomsky, called the father of linguistics, disagrees. He thinks this is not likely. But AI is being now demonised by some as the next evil facing the human species.

Dominant Homo sapiens groups possess the incredible capacity to disguise, dissimulate, using ideology, the media, its monstrous chimp face.

Comparatively small groups of human beings, at the very beginning of the 17th century, decided to send war and trade missions all the way from the Cape of Good Hope in Southern Africa to China. Ships bearing the full authority of the British crown. Funded by merchants, port owners, joint stock companies. To seize territory. Establish military bases. To free up trade routes. To seize nations. And ended up with the seizure of India. Malaya, Borneo, Hong Kong, Ceylon, Singapore, parts of China and so on. This extended to the Americas. The Caribbean. Africa. And all of this was by a very small group of humans. Court officials. Bureaucrats. Bankers. Traders.

This west European maraud seized large areas of the world for 500 years and dominated it. It was engaged in two world wars, the dropping of atom bombs in Japan. Most of these wars are geared against red people, yellow people, black people, brown people, those in the nether regions of Western Europe, Serbia, Yugoslavia, the Slavs and so on.

There are now engaged in other wars of that sort. They are now encircling China with military bases. What Obama, after the pacification of the Middle East, called pivot to China. And attempts to push NATO down the gullet of Russia. The world is being challenged with nuclear war. By the most warlike chimps of the human species.

And this is the real threat to the planet, humanity. A small dominant group gospelling 500 years of imperialist dicta: its “exceptionalism,” its “manifest destiny,” its “gunboat diplomacy” and its “big stick policy.” The quest for control. Further control of world markets. World resources. The commercial system established since the East India Company at the beginning of the 17th century aspires for its highest point. Its apotheosis.

This is the real threat: the threat of unipolarity by a single warmonger chimpanzee group. And if it is given the opportunity, by China, Russia, India, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, it will cause the existential ruin of homo sapiens, not AI. Not the rest of humanity.