Machines Will Never Replace Humans

Human creativity is and will remain the greatest wonder of the modern world.

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash.

Human beings reign supreme in the animal kingdom. Who can deny it?

Our closest living animal relatives- biologically, the chimpanzee and behaviorally, the bonobo- live exclusively in a tiny portion of equatorial Africa. If we were looking at it on a globe, the entire kingdom of our distant primate cousins would amount to something about the size of Delaware.

Human beings, on the other hand, have spread out everywhere on Earth. We’ve been to the moon for good measure. We’ve explored the tallest mountaintops, visited the lowest depths of the ocean.

Left our trash there, too.

The very smartest of our animal relatives is, on average, about as smart as a human toddler. There are a few animals who have graduated to using tools, but not many.

Chimps sometimes use a stick to fish ants from a rotten log. Very intelligent crows have been observed utilizing roadway crosswalks in order to A.) place a nut in the pathway of a soon-to-be oncoming car, then B.) wait for the appropriate walk signal to retrieve the broken-open nut.

As impressive as that is, humans spilt the atom.

We built the Large Hadron Collider, dammed the Three Gorges. Humans invented the wheel, the internal combustion engine, metallurgy, writing, the pentium processor, anesthesiology, oil painting and MTV.

We sit very comfortably at the top of the food chain. Worldwide, animals kill thousands of people per year, mostly by accident. Mountain lions and polar bears are two of the vanishingly few number of animals who will intentionally stalk, hunt and kill humans. Humans kill billions of animals every minute.

But we weren’t always this special.

For almost 200,000 years of anatomical modernity, the greatest achievement of the human race was the hand axe. It was as simple as it sounds; a rock, sharpened on one side, held in the hand, used for chopping wood and cleaning animal hides.

We’ve come a long way since then, but we don’t know exactly why.

When in comes to humans and their place in the animal kingdom, known wisdom falls…