What is more disruptive with AI: Its dark potentials or our (anti-Intellectual) Ignorance?

Byline: Prof. Anis H. Bajrektarevic

Throughout most of human evolution both progress and its horizontal transmission was an extremely slow, occasional and tedious process. Well into the classic period of Alexander the Macedonian and his glorious Library of Alexandria, the speed of our knowledge transfers - however moderate, analogue and conservative - still always outpaced our snail-like cycles of our developmental breakthroughs. When our sporadic breakthroughs finally became faster than their infrequent transmissions, that marked a point of our departure.

Simply put, our civilizations started to significantly differentiate from each other in their respective techno-agrarian, politico-military, ethno-religious or ideological, and economic setups. Soon, after, the Grand Discoveries (Europe's shift to west) were the event transforming wars and famine from the lowimpact and local one, into the bigger and cross-continental. Faster cycles of technological breakthroughs, patents and discoveries rather than their own transfers, occurred primarily within the Old continent. That occurrence, with all its reorganizational effects, radically reconfigured societies. It ultimately marked a birth of several mighty European empires, their (liberal) schools (and consequent imperial weaponization of knowledge) - hence an overall, lasting triumph of Western civilization.

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For the past few centuries, we've lived fear but dreamt hope - all for the sake of modern times. From WWI to www. Is this modernity of internet age, with all the suddenly reviled breakthroughs and their instant transmission, now harboring us in a bay of fairness, harmony and overall reconciliation? Was and will our history ever be on holiday? Thus, has our world ever been more than an idea? Shall we stop short at the Kantian word - a moral definition of imagined future, or continue to the Hobbesian realities and look up for an objective, geopolitical definition of our common tomorrow?

The Agrarian age inevitably brought up the question of economic redistribution. Industrial age culminated on the question of political participation. Today, AI (Quantum physics, Nanorobotics and Bioinformatics) brings a new, yet underreported challenge: Human (physical and mental) powers might - far and wide, and rather soon - become obsolete. If or when so, the question of human irrelevance is next to be asked.

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