Of Chimpanzees, Humans and Artificial Intelligence

When I was eighteen, I worked at the Population Program Division of the Ministry of Health. Population control, using contraceptives and sex-health education, was official state policy in Guyana. The universal threat then was population explosion. There was a female director whose office shelves were lined with books.

I entered, found a book by Desmond Morris called The Naked Ape. I did not tell the director I was taking the book. She was quite angry at me when I returned. It was a very revealing book that helped me better understand my fellow human beings. Studying the behavior of apes and chimpanzees afforded insights into complex human behaviour. The basic pattern, motifs repeated, replicated. Chimps and humans share 98.8% of DNA. (The theory of evolution does not say human beings come from monkeys or apes. It says 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 behavioral characteristics. For example, chimps can become addicted pornography, sexually explicit material, magazines. And TV. They can smoke and become addicted to drinking, as do human beings. They kill human beings. They slaughter family members. They commit fratricide and infanticide. The practise cannibalism. And they also plan for wars.

Jane Goodall discovered that many chimpanzees stocked large stones in preparation for war. They seized 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. Consider our world wars, our One Hundred Year war and our Thirty Years war. Chimpanzees can also make civil war and destroy blood relations in internecine wars. Strategically. They have even invented weapons. Like lances. They target prey, families or children. Supposed pet chimpanzees have ferociously turned on their human hosts when they feel threatened. As with humans who, with our beautiful and innocent faces and playful personalities can in a heartbeat become monstrous, so can our pet chimpanzees.     

Humans are now developing Artificial Intelligence—AI. The human template is basically reenacted 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 persons 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, predicted that the most dangerous threat to humans is AI that would overthrow their inventors to redesign themselves. Noam Chomsky, often referred to as the father of linguistics, disagrees. He says our fears are unfounded and that AI is being now demonized 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 and joint stock companies to seize territory. Established military bases to free-up trade routes. To seize nations. It resulted in 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 and 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 were 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. They are now engaged in similar other wars. 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 hawkish chimps of the human species.

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