Expansion of the mind

When Lucy stood up in the African savannah for the first time, she demonstrated that humans could be fundamentally different from those who perished before them. Her mind was expanding and her thoughts, accelerating. With danger all around her, she was willing to explore information and that eventually propelled humans out of Africa and into the unknown. The expansion of the mind was the only attribute that fueled them out of mediocrity. However, recent history tells us that they are prone to the recurrence of ignorance.

Humans seem to have been successful in rewinding the progression of knowledge back - something that seldom happened for hundred thousand years. Knowledge was always expected to have a positive slope, and for most of the human history that was true. However, in the recent past it has substantially deviated from the expected norm. The reasons for this is unclear but one possibility is the availability of a large number of information channels. The advent of printing formalized and accelerated information flow that was largely constrained to word of mouth before that. Now that a large number of diverse channels allow the creation and dissemination of content, without the need for verification, information itself is losing meaning. In such a regime, aggregate knowledge can decline and this could create chaos in a system that relies on informed and rational decision-making at all levels.

The negative effects on policy due to loss of information are clear. Elections have produced sub-optimal outcomes and autocratic regimes have been able to sustain themselves without significant effort. As the seven billion cling together hoping for a better tomorrow, their leaders appear to lack information to move them forward. The only viable solution to this stalemate is education that provides the skills to distill noise into usable information.

A catastrophic divergence

For most of human history, knowledge was evenly spread across the populace. As they hugged each other to survive the extreme cold that reduced them to a few thousand, they shared information and knowledge freely. Human societies, thus far, thrived on the democratization of knowledge. Now, it appears that we are entering a regime in which there is a catastrophic divergence in knowledge among the seven billion, spread across the world. Most believe in religion and some in scientific theories, but neither is able to claim an understanding of the mystery that surrounds them.

Modern humans seem to have woven themselves into a web of confusion and complexity. The acceleration in aggregate knowledge provides a false impression of positive societal development. However, knowledge is increasingly concentrated in a small percentage of the population and the purveyors of this wealth are generally incompetent in their attempts to spread it. They seem inarticulate and stubborn, unable to bridge the gap between know-how and ignorance. Their language sounds foreign and their explanations of phenomena, downright incredible. This has left most of the population back in time, unable to lift their psyche from the depths of unprovable assumptions and pure speculation.

This divergence in knowledge is a dangerous trend for humanity. The situation is made worse by the incompetence of those who possess it and the inability of those who do not, to seek it. Education systems, catering to accumulating knowledge in a few, seem to have lost the plot. Educators have to understand that spreading knowledge is as important as advancing it. If they make the knowledge edifice ever taller without an expanding foundation, the long term results are likely negative.

Unless knowledge is spread more evenly across the population, a democratic society could arrest progress by elevating ignorance to power. This is arguably the biggest danger facing societies now.

Strategy v/s tactics

For many hundreds of thousands of years, the human brain specialized exclusively in tactics. Managing a simple objective function with two dimensions - food and sex, clearly pointed to maximizing utility in short horizons. Very recently, human societies have been treading on strategy to maximize long term viability of their species, something that is not well understood by a great swath of them. Strategy is inherently inefficient, especially if viewed through a tactical lens, for strategy almost always show negative benefits in short horizons. Human societies, led by those less mentally equipped to understand strategic implications, could deteriorate fast as their leaders attempt to implement tactics to benefit themselves.

Humans may be entering the most dangerous phase of their short existence. Sporting a badly designed infrastructure, thanks to a highly inefficient CPU and a physical infrastructure designed to last less than half of their expected lifespan, they appear to be in real bad shape. Thoughts don't come natural to them, but actions do as the males of the species went out every day, hunting and pillaging to their own satisfaction. It was never profitable to think and it has always been beneficial to show power as their opponents were either from a different clan or animals, substantially better built than themselves. Dislike and hate come to them without effort as they see a specimen that does not exhibit the attributes they are familiar with. Ironically, little do they know that the surface features or the origin of their fellow human beings are noise of such irrelevance that they have an equal chance to be related to anybody in the world as their neighbor. These ideas are indeed abstract and strategic, something the politicians and policy-makers around the world are not able to analyze.

As the extra-terrestrial seeking engineers and scientists lament at the absence of the travelling kind, they have to ask why an entity of intelligence would even make contact with them. After all, humans do not seem to understand biological entities, less endowed than them. It seems hopeless as the potent and deadly combination of ego and ignorance appears to lead the inefficient species to their certain extinction.