A Brief History Of The Human Brain: How We Got It All Wrong
All power corrupts, brain power being no exception. As it enlarged over millions of years, the human brain eventually became big enough to constitute a formidable weapon of mass destruction. Humans became an existential threat to the planet, now that nothing could stand in their way. The tremendous competitive advantages of our large brain led to arrogance and the rise of narratives of supremacy over other beings, which formed the ideological bedrock of a civilisation sustained by ecocide. In the millennia that followed, our ecocidal culture became a positive feedback loop that further trained our brain at solving survival problems through ecological fraud, rather than regenerative approaches. This is why our brain today intuitively functions more effectively as a weapon rather than as a reasoning device. We are designed this way.
The historical parallels between the appearance of Homo sapiens on Earth and the emergence of AI cannot be overlooked. In the same way that AI represents an unprecedented threat to humans, the rise of Homo sapiens was an unprecedented nightmare for Earth’s 10 million species. Intelligence, whether biological or artificial, is the worst predator of all: there can never be a defence against, or escape from, a game-changing new life form that is more intelligent than anything preceding it.
It was unfortunate, but also unavoidable, that evolution would gift us with a brain of tremendous processing capacity, yet little ability for self-reflection. The paradox of how brains evolve is that they don’t necessarily become more “intelligent”: evolutionary pressure on the brain selects for survival tactics and risk-taking behaviour geared towards the survival of the species possessing this brain, not the survival of the planet it lives on or the other species it shares it with. Evolution often selects for survival skills geared towards cannibalism, as this encourages survival of the mentally fittest (or “evilest” if you like) within the species itself. As it evolved, our brain continued to optimize itself as a killing machine to maximize its chances of survival. The dark take-home lesson is that both genocide and ecocide run in our DNA, not only in our culture.
The risks that humans took throughout their history overwhelmingly paid off, functioning as a reward system that further supercharged the evolution of our brain into a risk-taking machine. It became a sophisticated, highly dangerous RELD: a Resource Exploitation Logistical Device.
The RELD was a gadget with a purpose.