Enhancing Human Intelligence

Scientists continually talk about artificial intelligence along with the benefits and dangers of it. We have been exposed to hundreds of movies, books and television shows depicting evil computers going after the human race and the rational usually is they find us to be a blight on the planet. It makes good entertainment sometimes, but scientifically speaking there may be a bigger threat out there which you don’t hear very much about. Let me start out by saying the most efficient computer by far is the human brain. Even the best electronic computers cannot hold a candle to it. If you wanted to build the fastest car in the world would you start by reinventing the wheel? I don’t think anyone would and this is why some scientists are now saying we already have the basis for the most incredible computer there is and it is right in our skulls. They believe the way to go is to enhance our brains by building devices which will make the human brain more efficient and powerful. This could be more dangerous than any machine, given the way our nature works.

None of us are perfect and it seems a lot of us have secret natures which we keep under control, but what would happen if suddenly we were given the power of a God? We have been on a long trail of brain improvement as a species. It started when the first of us set foot on this planet. Our brains have been getting better ever since, but it is a very slow evolutionary process. If you don’t believe in evolution you might not believe this is true at all. For the sake of this article I am going to go with the idea we have been getting better and our brains have been improving, because this is what the majority of scientists believe. Could we even handle a sudden huge increase in brain power and intelligence? Some don’t believe we could and that it might create a mental disease such as schizophrenia.

For those of you who keep track of what is happening in science, you have to know we are performing brain experiments which would have been considered science fiction twenty years ago. An example of this is hooking up two brains and enabling one to control the other. We have actually done this and the ramifications of it certainly don’t make me feel good about it. It indicates to me that it is almost possible to control us and take away any free will we have. Can you just see us being controlled in some way and being told it was being done for the good of humanity? This may not be as farfetched as it sounds. If a person’s brain was enhanced enough would he be able to control our brains? Think about this, this person could become a true dictator. People wonder why Hitler was so persuasive, imagine someone who could actually control what we did and thought using his brain power. Would he not be even more dangerous than any machine we could manufacture?

There is another thing scientists are talking about and that is connecting all our brains to an information base and to each other so that any one brain will have access to any information in the world. This would be a hive mind of sorts. I can’t think of anything much more terrible than that. How would you like to have the entire world being able to access your thoughts? Humans need some privacy and I think this would be dreadful and cause problems for many if not all of us. We might eventually all be driven mad and the human race could turn into something far different than it is now. It could turn into a race of insane beings. There are certain things required by humans to keep their sanity and I think being able to keep one’s thoughts to themselves is one of the things we all need. The only exception I can see for this is in the criminal justice area. If would be good to know if someone was really guilty of a crime and if we were able to read the mind of a suspect this might eliminate all those people who are in jail by mistake.

There are a few people who believe if our brains are augmented past a certain point we might begin to see things around us we didn’t know were there. Do things like this exist, could there possibly be beings from another dimension sharing the same space we live in which we are not aware of? Sounds weird doesn’t it, but we never know what we might find out about this universe. I am not saying they are right by the way, just that there are mysteries which we may not be aware of. What scientists want to do after increasing the visual cortex is to augment the pre-frontal cortex. This would create a race of geniuses. It is believed when this happens we will be able to do things previously thought impossible. The world would change overnight because of this and many if not all of scientific problems would be solved. This could create the biggest change in the world in the shortest time since the earth was created. If this is allowed to happen we would become a race of supermen and superwomen in just about every way.

Perhaps the way to stop augmented humans from becoming tyrants is to augment everyone, this would limit their power over mankind. Could this be the stage we were about to reach in our past. Some people believe we were much more advanced in the past and then wiped out in some sort of nuclear war and cite the fact that there are ancient cities on earth which still have nuclear residue and in which skeletons were found face down in the street as if they were victims of a nuclear bomb blast and there were also shadows of people found on some walls. If we tie this into the theory that Mars was also attacked with two huge nukes and that there are ruins on the moon which seems to be the remains of a war, it might mean we were not only on Earth, but on the moon and Mars and bombed back to the Stone Age. Is it possible aliens might look at the fact we could become enhanced and feel threatened by us due to our nature of war?

If we eventually gain the ability to enhance the human brain, will the ability be applied evenly? Of course not. Does anyone seriously think the rich and powerful want us to be their equals? Even if we were to get enhancements they would probably be inferior to those the important people would get, but this would probably be kept secret for as long as it could be. Soldiers might get enhancements related to making them more efficient on the battlefield without getting the God like ones. People may be assigned enhancements according to their job titles which are developed to make them more efficient at their particular jobs. We might never see the real powerful stuff.

Are we going in the right direction or will this eventually destroy us? It is a hard question to answer. One thing is for sure, we have to be very careful in the next steps we take.