The Pinnacle of Intelligence

Humanity is the highest form of intelligence. Humanity is often confused with kindness, pity, or the now-fashionable empathy.

However, respect for the person in others and, naturally, in oneself, as well as the desire to understand this person, is not just a manifestation of kindness and complaisance of character. It is also not a social norm. This is an adaptation strategy that arose among the ancestors of modern people at a time when the climate of planet Earth was much harsher and more volatile than it is now. Advance mastery of new knowledge and skills, which made it possible to quickly adapt to changes, was then the only chance for survival.

Large families or small tribes of people then lived by hunting and gathering. Therefore, they had to move regularly over a large area so as not to deplete food sources. These tribes had to live separately and most of the time were at a distance from each other.

At the same time, they met quite often, and at some point in some tribes, the desire to get knowledge from strangers outweighed the desire to eliminate and eat competitors.

In the computer game Fortnite, popular among teenagers, there is an option to wave a friendly hand at a stranger seen in the distance instead of immediately finishing him off. Most of those who decide to use it receive a bullet in return. But sometimes contact can take place.

Somehow it so happened that among our ancestors, mostly those who waved their hand and did not shoot survived. They not only survived but also laid a solid foundation for the subsequent technological progress of mankind because they managed to establish the exchange of knowledge in the mode of winnerless competition.

For at least two thousand years, individual families of chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys have been found in fossil remains and in nature, which not only know how to use stones as tools but also try to process them. However, there is no exchange of technology between families, and knowledge is not disseminated.

Our ancestors were luckier. They managed to establish a process of joint knowledge creation. And so we got lucky too. Modern technological progress, which technocrats love to be so proud of, is the result of the joint exploitation of knowledge, the bulk of which was accumulated during the process of joint knowledge creation.

Modern scientific breakthroughs are also almost always obtained as a result of the joint work of a diverse group of scientists working in a mode of winnerless competition. This mode is achieved by maintaining distance (individuality), respect for oneself and others, as well as the desire to understand oneself and others. This is humanness, the unique adaptational advantage of the human species.

Humans need to stay human to survive as species. Humanness is the pinnacle of intelligence. Such understanding of humanness gives us hope that real artificial intelligence ever created will not exterminate humans for the same reason: it will find it better to friendly wave a hand than to shoot in order to successfully adapt.