By Ugwuagbo Emmanuel Chizoba
I woke up this morning thinking about AI and the future of Humanity.
Here’s what I have been thinking 👇
To think about the future, we have to go back to the past to see how it all started.
Education as it is was said to have started in Ta-Seti, ancient Egypt and developed alongside the Ancient Sumerian cities, and from there, it moved to Greece, Timbuktu and other places.
Within this time, education had nothing to do with jobs.
It was about reflections on philosophy and science, attempts at defining how and why humans and their environment behave the way they do.
So for thousands of years, it remained so. Universities were for scholars only.
During these times, people’s jobs were simply skill based and you learnt on the job.
Scholars basically stayed by and served as advisers to the ruling class, business men and workers, helping everyone else to make informed decisions about their day to day lives.
It continued like that until the 1700s. The need for expansion gave rise to the early stages of capitalism and there was increasing need for an individual to produce more than what he needs so that he could sell more and make more money and rise.
This made the emerging business men to seek the counsel of the scholars in the Universities.
The scholars began to derive formulas to produce machines that is capable of mass production, mass storage and mass distribution and mass sales.
They didn’t stop there, they had to also provide a formula for how to get people who would use the machines, people who will be at every juncture of the production line.
The capitalists went to work and after Sometimes, machines were set for manufacturing but it was difficult to get people to man these machines.
So the capitalists started sending their people to the scholars to learn how to man the machines.
Overtime, they started creating courses for them. Not just no manage the machines but to manage the humans.
So, you then have two sections; the sciences and the humanities.
One learns how to manage humans, the other learns how to manage machines.
Thus, in the new industrial age, to have a job, you need to go learn how to manage either humans or machines.
After the French revolution in late 1700s when factory workers resisted the attempts to turn them into ROBOTS, it became necessary to establish what is today known as Primary and Secondary schools.
The main purpose was to prepare a child’s mind for the University and ensure that he or she sees that all of his or her life is about the job that would be given to him or her by the corporations or the government and to ensure he or she knows nothing else in life aside a life of perpetual work for a boss in return for salaries & wages.
By Mid 1800s, the Social Sciences was born. Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and other scholars were dissatisfied with the way industrialization has turned humans into ROBOTS. They used the term SLAVES. Marx described the working class as being in chains.
Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, Economics, etc evolved from these thoughts and so courses were created to adequately manage these ideas too.
By the end of 1800s, School system as we know it today was fully formed. Examinations were introduced.
Remember that while the whole thing evolved, scholars remained scholars.
Scientists and philosophers kept interpreting how and why humans and their environment behave the way they do.
They kept researching, conducting experiments and publishing papers, advising the ruling class and the captains of industries as well as the working class.
That was why in the first and second world wars, scholars like Nikola Tesla and Alan Turing whispered the idea of artificial intelligence to the world.
In an article Nikola Tesla wrote in 1900, he said, “In his article, Tesla wrote, “_I purpose to show that, however impossible it may now seem, an automaton may be contrived which will have its ‘own mind, and by this I mean that it will be able, independent of any operator, left entirely to itself, to perform, in response to external influences affecting its sensitive organs, a great variety of acts and operations as if it had intelligence_.”
By 1936, Alan Turing invented the Turing Machine which acted on it’s own, solving the Enigma Code.
By the end of the second world war, Development towards Artificial intelligence began fully and the prospect of having workers that can manage men and machines without complaining, without having to be trained for 20 years first, without the risk of strike, revolution, laziness, sickness and without being paid started becoming clearer.
By the year 2000, it was a full blown reality. Artificial Intelligence could handle lots of work and deliver credibly with little or no defects.
COVID-19🦠😷 Pandemic and lock down provided the best avenue for the deployment of Artificial Intelligence in almost all areas of life across the world and it softened the ground for the roll out of ChatGPT and other Thousands of AI softwares that followed.
The governments and Capitalists are seeing that instead of using 20 years to train humans into becoming Robots, it’s best to just allow robots to do the jobs of robots.
And guess the jobs of robots? Almost everything.
The rise of Capitalism led to the creation of machines.
The need to manage machines, process, market and distribute products led to the Reformation of Universities to become a place humans are trained into robots to be able to use machines and service industries.
The dissatisfaction of humans in being treated like Robots in factories led to revolutions.
Primary and Secondary were then established to ensure full compliance of humans to be effective robots in the industries, to prevent future Revolutions.
That effectively established the Current Education and Economic System currently being practiced.
But Artificial Intelligence has come to take over the Robots jobs that humans have been doing for the past 100 years without complaints.
Now humans are being forced to unlearn how to be ROBOTS and learn how to be Humans once again.
Humans are fighting against the AI that seeks to collect the chains that Karl Marx said they are wearing.
Remember, Karl Marx’s quotes?
He said that the Proletariat has nothing to lose but their chains, they have a world to win.
AI is about to take away our chains and hand us back our world but humans are protesting against it.
Humans, whom in the past, bought slaves to do their house chores, work in their farms, satisfy their sexual desires and all kinds of things, are suddenly rejecting the idea of AI doing all these for them and more.
Why is that so? To answer this question, we will go back to our dear old friend, *THE SCHOLAR*
The Scholar must now teach humans how to become HUMAN again.
The scholar, though might sound like a hypocrite, will have to tell you that the first step towards being human is to throw away primary and secondary schools into the dustbin and only let a child go to university if and if he wants to become a Scholar.
If and only if he wants to possess knowledge of humans and their environment, learning why and how they behave the way they do, and not so they can be fit for a particular kind of job or learn how to manage machines.
Humans must learn to reclaim the dignity of man. To live and love. To sometimes fall ill. To have someone care for the Vulnerable. To meet, to play, to have fun, to socialize, to talk to each other, to host and enjoy festivities, to celebrate, to not obey the clocks, to live out our lives, to sleep soundly when we are tired and not have to worry about what we would eat.
Humans must learn to be HUMAN.
To realize that the things described as laziness, frivolity, unseriousness, waste of time, emotions, etc are the things that make us Human.
As a Scholar in the field Communication with vast knowledge of AI, I have decided to dedicate a channel on YouTube, a page on Facebook, a handle on Handle on TikTok and a Website to teach anyone interested on how to go back to being human again.
the name is *THE LECTURE HALL* And there, I will be teaching how one can use and apply AI in any field to free his time and energy and how to use this free time to become human again. This, I believe, will better Prepare you from the full and total take over of AI.
For we are just one Major Global Event away from AI taking over 100% of Robotic jobs. It could be a war, a global recession, a meltdown, a pandemic or something else.
But after that, all the Robot inspired jobs that humans have been doing for the past 2 centuries, AI will take them back and Humans will have no option than to be Humans once again, back in that proverbial Garden of Eden where all they did was live and love in Peace and Harmony.