Burke outlines a number of seemingly never ending regional conflicts, causing no end of misery and death among local populations: Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, the Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name the more frequently profiled ones. Often these conflicts follow boundaries that divide clans or castes, not necessarily countries. They lie along frontiers between ethnic or sectarian communities:

In fact, if we look around the world at all its many conflicts, and if we define these wars more broadly, then we see front lines everywhere, each with its own no man’s land strewn with casualties. In Mexico, Brazil, South Africa or the Philippines, there is huge violence associated with criminality and the efforts (by states) to stamp it out .

And so the article goes on to analyze a number of these protracted conflicts in order to get a sense of what lies at the heart of them, in particular as to their history and the seeming inability to get them resolved.

The reasons are clearly many and varied – and to say that they are complex is perhaps an understatement. But as to any kind of overall “why”, the only common element appears to be the persistent inability of our species to get out from underneath the quagmire of basic instincts and desires that appear to feed  the negative human characteristic  we are all too familiar with, such as greed, selfishness,  bullying  and the exploitation and oppression of others,  to name just a few, and all them typically leading to conflict. This as opposed to being guided by more enlightened qualities of human endeavor such as being able to compromise, mediate, cooperate  and share with the realization that all human interests are best served by them.

In the meantime there remains the question of how to address the current states of affairs as outlined in the Guardian article. Essentially, though, they appear unsolvable, except by more of the same, and unless the conflicting parties agree to sit down to discuss a solution beyond trying to kill each other, there is not much left on the table but to continue the mutual bloodshed.

If these conflicts are evidence of something, it is that evolutionary pressures are operation at all levels of existence, and that includes the competition between ideas about what kind of societies we should structure for ourselves, and the principles that underpin them, i.e., social-economically, politically, morally. At the bottom of this struggle we find the Might is Right conundrum, and essentially the Law of the Jungle, bequeathed to us courtesy of our animal past in our participation in the Survival of the Fittest contest and obviously still very much a part of our way of dealing with the world.

When reason – that feature of the human cortex most recently required as a result of an evolutionary upgrade – is subjugated to instinct, the Law of the Jungle continues to prevail and becomes even more destructive, if not to the point of self-destruction, as in the case of potentially trying to annihilate ourselves by throwing nuclear bombs at each other.

The issue here of course is why we would allow reason to be overruled by instinct and  in particular when there are clear reason to believe that in a particular case this would not be in our interest. But the first response here would be to say that these are not matters of black and white, and that we might well confuse the one for the other.

As well, the ability to apply reason is a skill that must be learned – and just because you have the capacity for it in the cerebral  hardware department, all that means is that you have the prerequisites  for being able to act rationally.

However, it should be clear that even after minimal observation of human behavior and the current state of the world that the application of reason  requires training, as well as the insight into what benefits our species in the long term, and I like to think that this would be about more than the fact of our mere  survival. To act instinctively, however, is something we are born with, and built into the biology of our species,  from the very first phases of existence as a distinct organism that needed to be able to look after itself  to ensure its survival.

And so not much is likely to change in the world with respect to these kinds of conflicts until such time that we change our ways and wake up to the fact that we are not the creature that we think we are, i.e., that we must be the creature as defined by our past, and our bloodstained, war-torn history.

Instead we need to respond to the call of what it means to be a rational human being, or at least have the imagination and courage to try to find out what that might be all about without the need to kill each other. And this would mean redefining ourselves in terms of our future, and what we may be able to accomplish as a species motivated by the more enlightened principles of empathy and compassion, as well as the spirit of mutual cooperation  between nations with the realization that the shared stewardship of the earth resources is the only way to guarantee our peaceful coexistence  on this planet.

How we will get to that point is anyone’s guess – and if our species  is actually capable of that much common sense  I don’t know.  Given the state of the world today – and the quality of the leadership that appears to be in charge of the world’s most powerful nations – I am not hopeful that any of this will happen anytime soon.

“Until it begins, war is a matter of choice. After that, it’s shaped by forces and realities which dwarf the individuals who participate.”  (Joshua Rothman writes in the New Yorker in December of 2017 , reviewing Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Second World Wars”)

The ability of AI systems to transform vast amounts of complex, ambiguous information into insight has the potential to reveal long-held secrets and help solve some of the world’s most enduring problems. AI systems can potentially be used to help discover insights to treat disease, predict the weather, and manage the global economy. It is an undeniably powerful tool. And like all powerful tools, great care must be taken in its development and deployment. However, to reap the societal benefits of AI systems, we will first need to trust it.

What kind of trust are we referring to here? This is a very complex question. The more we let AI into our lives, the more likely we are to develop a dependency on it, and the amount we are willing to trust it will be in direct relationship to the willingness to have our lives altered by its outcomes, as the rise of AI will have no doubt a bearing on them, regardless what aspect of life we might be talking about.

It remains an open question, however, if will we be willing  to trust AI when it pushes us into a direction that at first glance appears to be not in our best interest, if only because we might not fully understand the reasons for an AI derived conclusion. From an article in Bloomberg Businessweek titled Artificial Intelligence Has Some Explaining to Do by Jeremy Kahn:

This is what gives AI much of its power: It can discover connections in the data that would be more complicated or nuanced than a human would find. But this complexity also means that the reason the software reaches any particular conclusion is often largely opaque, even to its own creators.

Nevertheless, I believe AI will continue to gain our trust gradually and take an ever greater role in our daily lives. The technology will seduce us with the ability to seemingly give us everything we ask for, leading to our ever greater dependency on it, and leading us to believe that we can take its credibility for granted, and that would be a dangerous thing. At bottom, AI is a machine, and a calculator working with an algorithm (a set of rules governing a deductive process) and any data derived from it is subject to the age old dictum “garbage in – garbage out”.  To safeguard the integrity of a process is one thing, safeguarding the integrity of the data it is working on is a whole different matter.

In addition, we need to worry about that has been referred to as “machine learning”, the ability of an AI machine to “improve” on its own programming in order to overcome its deductive limitations, e.g., allow it to simulate an inductive or inferential process, to make the process seem more “human”, or as smart, if not smarter.   I’m thinking about situations where AI is faced with incompatible observations – or when there is just not enough data – in which case it might be allowed to arrive at some kind of “best guess” scenario by either modifying one of its procedural rules or by introducing some other random factor to settle the issue in order to arrive at a “reasoned” conclusion.

The fact remains that a mechanical analysis cannot find its way out of conflicting data by means of a “gut” feeling, i.e., the appeal to instinct or intuition, or the application of other unique human qualities such as empathy and compassion since they cannot be translated into machine language. At most, a machine might be able to simulate them to an extent based on what it has “learned” about these qualities from the observation of human behavior in a variety of scenarios. And if AI can only simulate human reasoning, that is not the same as replacing it, as for that it would have to plugged into the the very source of what makes us human.,

While this may be good enough for some,  such as the followers of the late  behaviourist psychologist B.F Skinner – who hypothesize that human behaviour is strictly a function of environmental factors, and not driven by thoughts or emotions – I think they are definitely out to lunch on that front.  There is a logical gap between what is as observed as human behaviour and that which motivates it from within, and what it means to be human is the only thing that fits in that space and is able to connect the two,  i.e., the difference between what is seen in the mirror and that which causes the reflection.

The upshot is that the essence of what it means to be human cannot be quantified and reduced to a set of rules governing machine language, and that AI can never be more than an augmentation to human intelligence.  This so we will continue to strive for efficacy over efficiency, to ensure we will choose quality over quantity, and that our continuing development as a species will always be a reflection of that,  uncertain as our future seems at the moment.