Some 70 thousand years ago, Homo Sapiens experienced a profound cognitive diversion which set them apart not only from all other animals on earth but also from all other hominid species existing right beside it.
How it happened, or even what exactly was it that had changed, cannot be said with any certainty, but what can be said is that this alteration in our ancestral brains allowed our species to employ a powerful cognitive tool better than any living creature that had come before or after - that tool is the imagination.
The development of powerful imagination allowed our ancestors to start believing in the imaginary value of non practical objects, as evident by seeming trade of seashells throughout locations where no sea nor shells were ever present, by evidence of large scale cooperation between communities and tribes - in scales and magnitudes never seen before in mammals(1), by evidence of long term thinking and predicting that the burning down of forests would lead to pasture lands, inviting easy prey for them to hunt in future years, by evidence of the creative application and manufacturing of tools beyond any capability displayed by other hominids, and, perhaps most relevant to the subject at hand - the way said evolution of imagination allowed our ancestors to have the visions of other non-human elaborate intelligence.
The first evidence of such imagined beings comes from a single sculpture of a lion headed man, today known simply as the Lion-man, a figurine dating from 35 to 40 thousand years ago, representing the oldest undoubted example of a figurative art, and oldest (that we found) depiction of a humanoid that isn’t human.
We have no evidence of whether or not the statuettes creator really did imagine it as having an intelligence, but something about the unmistakably humanoid appearance of it, and our understanding of how our minds project themselves atop of all of our creations, I feel it is not only poetic to assume that Lion-man had been implicitly imbued with the intelligence of it’s creator, but also something to which we can refer with confidence and say “it has been likely so”.
Since then, mankind has always shown a fascination with intelligence which isn’t human - intelligence that’s always an imaginary construct of our minds - intelligence that we have artificially created. Be it that it was created for the sake of rituals, for myths, or for religion, it is uncontested that ever since there had been recorded history - there had been non-humanoid intelligence imagined, recorded and explained by humankind. And if we are to talk about the Artificial Intelligence that we all know from books and cinema, and Artificial Intelligence that we, in recent decades, began to practically construct, we must first look upon the context that ideas of Artificial Intelligence existed in since times when humankind has first envisioned it into this world.
For the history of Artificial Intelligence is the history of humankind itself, and the future of it is our inevitable future.
In the next series of posts which will be titled “AI: Historical and Cultural context”, we will explore the past, the present and the future of AI, and look in depth at the development of the cognitive, cultural and technological infrastructures that had allowed AI to happen in the form in which it is today. We will explore the impacts of AI, both from before when it was tangible and in our hands, and from today, on different cultures and societies, and ultimately we will strive to frame AI within the context of humanity - and frame humanity within the context of AI.
(1) In reference to "large scale cooperation":
Mammalian cooperation appears to be hard-coded in nature to a limit of around 150 individuals, where it is very rare to see cooperative groups exceeding this amount by little, and further - is impossible to find cooperative groups exceeding this amount by much.
Homo Sapiens are the exception to this rule, and imagination is assumed to have played a key role in this as it allowed large groups of individuals, that previously relied on personal familiarity and intimacy to establish trust and cooperation, to begin operating together with complete strangers in numbers that they could never hope to be familiar with, under the banner of common beliefs in unifying imaginary entities, akin to how today many strangers can cooperate and trust one another under the banner of such entities like "states" and "companies".
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