Learning Kenyanese

• ARE HUMAN BEINGS THE ULTIMATE RACE?

  Posted: June 7, 2008, 7:54 pm by willpress

  It has been told in many stories both religious and folklore of how the human race, in its elevated status of being a photocopy of God's(or gods) image and likeness ,is perceived by all as the ultimate race of the world. The most sophisticated of all living organisms. Amid this trumpet blowing and chest thumping that has gone on for thousands of years a time has come to ask ourselves if we really are the ultimate race beyond reasonable doubt. This article will attempt to explore four different concepts that shed light on the proposition that this could actually be to the contrary. As poetic as it may sound, proper understanding of this piece may arise from only an objective pondering of the same.
  
  Son is Greater than the Father Theory?
  Many philosophers an futurists seem to prescribe to this theory that lays down a sort of probability scale on future human extinction. We know that even with the current accords and treaties to shun the production of nuclear weapons, it is an open secret that there has been an increase in nuclear activity than ever before from India ( in the guise of seeking alternative energy sources) to Iraq (tired of being bullied the prefects of the world, USA and UK).
  Now ,supposing a full-scale war arose compelling the use of nuclear weapons en masse thus reducing every square inch of land to a modern day Hiroshima? A world-wide nuclear could result in a major climate shift that could wipe out any chance of sunshine for thousands of years and as a result wipe out most human organisms including the human race. This is not far from, reality though this may sound like a memo from the House of Yahweh. There will be more radical Osama’s and less reasonable Bushes in days to come.
  The question then to be asked is if most life forms, humans included are quashed by a nuclear winter or any such like natural calamities, would the world as we know it come to an end? NO! This would merely lead to the emergence of an artificial Big Bang. Cockroaches and such organisms known to be resistant to nuclear explosives and radioactivity of immense levels will revise the evolution process and maybe lead to the emergence of more intelligent life forms than what can be safely be known as human beings .This theory ,however dismissed as belonging to philosophers' lunch breaks, shouldn’t be taken so lightly in my view.
  AI and the Intelligence Explosion
  This is yet another shocking revelation from futurists who fondly call this concept "technological singularity”. In what people like to call the information technology era, a lot of progress is being made to create tools and machines to aid in raising the standards of human living. But to what extent will this progress concur with its aim?
  Futurists project that this progress will soon turn into an 'intelligence explosion' that is , the creation via artificial intelligence (AI) or computer interfaces
  
  smarter than human entities who rapidly accelerate technological progress beyond human capabilities. Statistician J.B. Good says "These machines could augment their own mental capabilities until they exceed that of their creators..the intelligence of man could be left far behind. Thus, the first ultra intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."
  Victor Vinge adds a more apocalyptic twist in his 1993 essay, The Coming of Technological Singularity: "Within 30 years we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence...shortly thereafter the human era will be ended." This could result from these superhuman intelligences ending up with goals inconsistent with human survival. Yes, all those cartoons you see about a mad scientist with a robot programmed to exterminate the human race could actually come true!
  Nick Bostrom in his 2002 essay on human extinction scenarios puts it into perspective: "We could mistakenly elevate [for these superhuman intelligences] a sub-goal to the status of a super goal and tell it to solve a problem...in the process killing the person who asked the question."Leaving the bulk of technological progress to such ultra-human robots could lead to a conflict between the human creator and the robots themselves as aptly illustrated by the film I,Robot .
  
  The Evolution Race
  The Times of April 17, 2007 reported the results of a University of Michigan study on comparative evolutionary progress of human and primate genes. Mark Henderson reports, "Chimps are ahead humans in the great evolutionary race.... they have evolved more extensively than the human race since they split from their common ancestor, challenging the conventional wisdom that Homo sapiens has been favored by natural selection."
  This should be a wake up call to us that since we have already been overtaken in the evolution process, let us not rule out the possibility of Planet of the Apes being acted out not in the imaginary confines of Hollywood directors' heads, but right here on Earth.
  
  
  Fallacy in the Intelligent Design Theory Proponents of this theory purport that everything in the world is mad especially that we can manage to live in it. Certain constants that make matter and life possible cannot be solely be attributed to chance, they claim. Analyzing one of their heavily touted examples, those keen enough may sense the whiff of fallacy in this reasoning.
  Rabbits, they argue, have white tails so that they can supposedly be easy to shoot. I am really interested to know how the rabbits would view such a claim. The real state of affairs is that nature provides some sort of balance and quid pro quo in that the environment wasn't suited for us but it is we who adapt to it instead. Anything to the contrary would most certainly amount to taking the Creation story a bit too far.
  
  The Underlying Psychology?
  But what is the underlying psychology that makes us want to validate this strong feeling of being the world's ultimate race?It is the perpetual fear of death. It is this fear that fuels our passion to play God and somehow extend the inevitability of death. Nation columnist Sammy Wambua comments that the future presents a very complicated time for human beings. With everyone going herbal in everything from tea to toothpaste, major research in stem cells and cloning, increased enthusiasm in 'extreme makeovers' and less and less people dying from nothing but the most complicated of diseases what more is there to expect?
  Bertand Russell in Why I am not a Christian says of the tragedy of human efforts in search of the famous Fountain of Youth, "Given omnipotence, omniscience an millions of years to perfect our world, we would come up with nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan [or something like Zimbabwe for that matter].To accept the laws of science, we will have to assume that human beings and other life forms on earth will die."
  In short, the world is not ending any time soon and maybe it will not be the human race that will witness its end. That may sound depressing but let us try and have Achilles' mentality in The Iliad:"The gods envy us because for our mortality" Knowing that life can end at any moment everything is more beautiful, more poetic. So let us live every second as if it our last. But let us not forget that their is something or someone greater than all of us out there that has a hand in shaping our destiny.

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Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes