[I have a few quibbles with this article, but they pale to insignificance in light of the profound thoughts it contains. Please do read it. Ed.]
Are we too smart for our own good?
Richard Heinberg, originally published by Resilience.org
Richard is Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute, and is regarded as one of the world’s foremost advocates for a shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels. He is the author of fourteen books, including some of the seminal works on society’s current energy and environmental sustainability crisis. He has authored hundreds of essays and articles that have appeared in such journals as Nature and The Wall Street Journal; delivered hundreds of lectures on energy and climate issues to audiences on six continents; and has been quoted and interviewed countless times for print, television, and radio. His monthly MuseLetter has been in publication since 1992. Full bio at postcarbon.org.
Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr (1904-2005)—who, I’m told, was a very smart person—concluded, late in life, that high intelligence may be a lethal mutation. In this article, we’ll explore some reasons for this startling and paradoxical assessment.
Intelligence is useful and entertaining. Companies go out of their way to hire applicants with high IQ scores, and spectacular intellectual achievements in the arts and sciences can win the hero-worship of generations (see Aristotle, Bach, Einstein). Measuring smarts is the job of an industry. Indeed, smartness is so endlessly praised in modern society that questioning its value may constitute one of the most dissident of human acts.
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The Sagan-Mayr debate was partly a response to the Fermi paradox—the observation in 1950 by physicist Enrico Fermi that there is a glaring discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparent high likelihood of its existence, given the vast number of stars likely to have life-conducive planets. There are several possible explanations for the paradox, but the simplest and most compelling are these two: first, that high intelligence doesn’t readily evolve, and hence is extremely rare in the universe; or second, that it tends to be self-extinguishing over fairly short time-scales, since organisms with the requisite linguistic and tool-making abilities will likely deplete their planetary resources and pollute their environments to the point of ecosystem and societal collapse before they develop the means to contact intelligent life forms elsewhere.
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We need to sharpen the noun wisdom with an adjective. Perhaps the best phrase to describe what humanity needs now is ecological wisdom, a term that has already gained some currency. Ecology, the study of the relationship between organisms and their environments, is the prototypical holistic, contextual discipline. Ecological wisdom might be considered a higher-level intelligence capable of reining in the unhinged hubris of the human intellect in favor of maintaining balanced relations with all other life forms. Many Indigenous societies maintained hard-won ecological wisdom, which they developed over multiple generations through trial and error. An ecologically wise community might say, with regard to AI, for example, “We could use this shiny new tool and reap some advantages; but let’s not, until we can be sure that the short-term benefits are not outweighed by long-term costs—not just to us, but to the ecosystem in which we live.”
How do we get collective ecological wisdom fast? A few philosophers are hopeful that “artificial wisdom” can be developed and deployed in time to save industrial society from climate change, resource depletion, increasing economic inequality, and all the other converging threats that now fly under the banner of “polycrisis.” However, I’m of the stubborn opinion that a truly wise computer algorithm could only be created by truly wise people.
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