JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: AN AUTHOR REGRETS HOW PEOPLE GIVE UP FREEDOMS IN THE NAME OF (WHAT HE REGARDS AS A NOT VERY DANGEROUS) PANDEMIC – BUT PEOPLE FOR THE MOST PART HAVE NEVER BEEN INDIVIDUALISTS – THERE IS MOSTLY HERD BEHAVIOR – A WORD ON MILITARY HIERARCHIES - OUR ANCIENT ANCESTORS AND OUR RELATIVES THE CHIMPS – A SPECULATION ON WHERE HUMAN EVOLUTION IS HEADED

John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MARKO MARJANOVIC IN ANTI-EMPIRE


“Terrified of COVID-19?”  

“It’s just going to get worse. we can’t even begin to imagine what is in store for us. Meanwhile, the herd will beg for more.”



Sorry, I think you have fantasies about humanity.

Nobel individuals standing up for themselves? Perhaps, Marko, you read too much Ayn Rand?

Humanity is, and always has been, much like a herd.

The apes we're descended from lived in tribal groups with sets of rules, just as chimps do today.

And they've even discovered that those chimp tribal groups periodically go off to attack a neighboring chimp tribal group, and do so quite viciously.

Does that sound familiar?
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Response to a reader who said, “Evolution still has a LONG way to go.”

Evolution is headed, and rather rapidly, towards artificial intelligence and robots.

They are the ones who will travel to the stars.

Our herd will be regarded as we do monkeys.

I believe in the search for other intelligent life in the universe - and absolutely it is there abundantly - the planets that really are advanced are likely robotic and have little or no interest in communicating with us.

That would explain the lack of signals despite years of effort looking.

There may be is only a relatively brief window in time when an evolving species such as ours is capable and interested in communicating.

For most of humanity's 200,000 years, we've had no ability.

And perhaps in another century, our successors, the robots, will have no interest.

The universe appears to have a "destiny" towards self-understanding, given the way evolution works and the way the earth keeps a record of its own history through fossils and geology.

Intelligence is the "arrow of time" in evolution, and robots can before a very long time far exceed us.

After all, we've been 200,000 years just about right where we are but learning over that period how to do things.

That effort to learn how to do things will continue, but human capacity will be inadequate to the need. Our successors will carry on, even periodically building more intelligent generations of themselves.

Regarding other civilizations in the universe, it is of course possible that in the "transition phase" in which we find ourselves, many perhaps destroy themselves with nuclear war and other severe perils.

Weapons too grave for monkey brains.


Readers might enjoy:

https://chuckmanrobots.blogspot.com/
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Response to a reader saying, “It is truly terrifying to watch how the sheep have acquiesced in their own enslavement”

Hardly more terrifying than the destructive stupidities of WW I and WW II and Vietnam and the Neocon Wars.

An immense amount of resources and effort dedicated solely to killing many, many millions of people and destroying many, many things.

And, of course, what is the social order which directs all of that activity?

A pyramidal hierarchy just like ancient Egypt.

That's the only way militaries ever function.

You find no Ayn Rand types ever functioning in a military. Nor any Mozarts or Bachs. They are outliers in terms of their genetic make-up.