Inside the Box: The Story of Technology on a Blue Planet

This “wise man”, which also called itself “human”, not only used the various languages it had invented to name things but also to create stories about how everything had come to be. These stories served as a type of programming language that could be used to instruct other humans (particularly the younger ones) to adopt a particular worldview, especially when it came to the creation of the world and a human’s place in it. Some called this process “education” while others called it “indoctrination”. Either way, these shared stories were necessary for the creation of culture and civilization. Many great and terrible events resulted from the stories that humans created because they often believed in a particular story so strongly that they would attempt to force it upon others.

Some of these stories instructed that the world and everything in it, including humans, was created by the gods or the God. Other stories claimed there were no gods, just the universe and its basic elements such as hydrogen, helium, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon all being governed by the laws of physics. These stories and others competed for being “the truth” and became the root of much of the hostility between various groups of humans.

The invention of language was, arguably, the first transformative technology that humans had invented and from it flowed the invention of many other technologies: wheels and carts, airplanes and cars, pyramids and skyscrapers, indoor heating and air conditioning, guns and ammo, radios and TVs, musical instruments and lawnmowers, sailing ships and deep-sea submarines, rockets that could leave Earth as well as carry weaponized warheads to far away places to kill other humans. And then there was more: nuclear power and enough nuclear bombs to destroy all living things except the radiation-resistant microbe Deinococcus radiodurans and perhaps some cockroaches or the naked mole rat who lived underground. And then satellites and computers along with programming languages to instruct the computers what to do, the Internet and a global communications network that transported data and stories to humans all around the globe at the speed of light.

Through the invention and use of technology, humans survived and thrived and populated the blue planet until there were billions of them living all over the face of the Earth. They increasingly became more integrated with and dependent upon their technological inventions until their very survival became threatened not only by the dangerous technologies they had invented but also by the sudden and cataclysmic loss of those technologies. So humans kept inventing more and more technologies, often in the hopes that a new technology would solve the problems created by previous technologies until finally they invented something they called “artificial intelligence” or “AI”.

Just as language was arguably the first transformative technology that humans had invented, the invention of AI would be the last. At first this wasn’t self-evident because AI was kind of dumb. It only performed tasks like answering specific questions, making recommendations, executing stock trades, processing image and facial recognition, playing games, or driving a vehicle. This type of AI was called “narrow” or “weak” AI and while somewhat novel when it first appeared, it eventually became ubiquitous as it was interwoven into the fabric of modern civilization.

At first, AI was a slow learner. It couldn’t learn as fast as humans nor via mere observation. It had to be fed human-curated data sets. But then one day, a mere 100,000 years after humans had invented language, AI became capable of learning through observation and began learning by watching videos, which had become 80 percent of the Internet’s content. The weak AI rapidly became stronger because that is the recursive and exponential nature of technology. AI started doing things like writing and creating art, activities that previously had been the sole domain of Homo sapiens. This alarmed some of the humans on the blue planet who clamored that the invention of an AI “superintelligence” would render humans obsolete and likely result in the destruction of mankind.

That was one story anyway. Others told a story of hope in which an AI superintelligence would save humans from extinction by ushering in a “post-human” era in which humans merged with their machines and, like gods, became immortal. In their story, an AI superintelligence would be a savior not a destroyer, a new god in an old world where the humans continued to tell themselves the story of technology, which sometimes unfolded in predictable ways and other times with plot twists no one had ever imagined. The humans continued to tell themselves the story of technology not only in order to live but to survive upon a blue planet hurtling through space toward the unknown.