Photo above: credit to FastCompany.com image gallery
As a society, we are connected on a global level. We can talk to someone around the world, in real time, in an instant. Humanity is at the cusp of a significant advancement which may, ultimately, lead to our demise.
Everything we could ever dream about, lust after, want to achieve or use for personal amusement is at our fingertips. The Internet is endless. The problem is, most of us aren’t using this magnificent tool we have created to improve ourselves or impact our World in a positive manner. Most people are constantly online whether it be on phones or computers sharing pictures of a vacation or a meal or sharing a cute animal video, but not talking about the important issues.
Humans have become slaves to technology and are becoming more self-indulgent than at any other time in the span of human history. The Earth simply cannot sustain the tremendous amount of demand for materials and food that needs to be produced for human consumption. Poor Mother Earth can’t heal herself quickly enough by replenishing healthy crops of food, creating large herds of animals or replacing all the trees we cut down.
We have become numb to seeing our effect on the oceans, land, animals and vegetation. Recycling still hasn’t caught on as much as it should. The amount of cardboard and plastic waste that is generated every day just so we can consume food, never mind clothing, vehicles and other products, is staggering and downright frightening!
Right now, you are probably thinking ‘Environment, blah, blah, blah. Recycling, blah, blah, blah’. We all know we should be more prudent and attentive to throwing out our garbage properly and trying to help the environment whenever we can, but we don’t.
While we have all been distracted by pipeline disputes, playground style keep-away with wine and the intense, and often embarrassing, political entertainment of North America’s Government leaders, an evolutionary step took place and most of us missed it.
Over the course of the past 50 years, billions upon billions of dollars have been spent to achieve the dream of having a World with self-thinking and self-learning Artificial Intelligence. This is not Science Fiction any longer.
A “Super Computer” has been created that, simply put, learns behaviors and speech patterns from reading and storing all of the photos, texts and social media messages we send one another. This Super Computer learns and interacts based on what it learns from our multitude of online shopping, surfing and chatting habits. It can search for one word in all of the written writings ever created, in a nanosecond.
Take a moment to pause and read the previous paragraph again. Humans have created a Super Computer that essentially learns and acts independently of human interaction or direction and can find any piece of information needed in an instant, but we cannot figure out how to drastically reduce the waste we are killing this planet, and ourselves, with.
I’m not trying to be all doom and gloom here, but humanity is in serious trouble, as a species. At some point, we will have face up to what is happening around us. Humans are the ants of the Earth. Instead of being busy destroying our home, we should be building it up and protecting it. Many people will say that it’s the Government’s problem to fix, but it is most definitely a societal problem.
There is a lot of truth in the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child.” We are all the people of a village and the Earth is our child. We need to start protecting and nurturing Earth and cleaning it up. The nuclear disaster in Fukishima, Japan has contaminated so much of the ocean that all matters of sea life are dying by the thousands. Fukishima is one example of hundreds of ocean disasters caused by humans that are now showing alarming long term effects. If the ocean life dies, eventually everything on this Earth will die. It is that simple.
Maybe that new Super Computer can be put to good use after all to come up with a plan to fix our planet in the hopes that we humans can sustain our existence for many years to come.
One Perspective 