Project Vision 21

In the last two and a half millennia we have gone from living in a small universe (about 40 miles in diameter) to living in a huge universe that is perhaps part of an infinite multiverse. And I went from assuming that our city was the navel of the universe to accepting that the center is everywhere and nowhere. But our mind is still as small and closed as ever.

Recently, for example, I received (as part of my consulting services) a document to be translated from English to Spanish. The document featured a series of steps to complete a certain task, so the steps were numbered: 1, 2, 3, and so on.

The document was accompanied by the request not to translate the numbers (1, 2, 3 and so on) from English to Spanish. Now, the numbers were not written with words, but with numbers. How could I, then, translate the "1" in English to the “1” in Spanish? Did the person who sent me the document assume that because I translated the document into Spanish that changed the meaning of "1" in English?

In another case, also related to translation, someone sent me a letter with a complicated format, which featured different types of fonts, different colors, bullet points, and links, among other elements. I completed the translation, sent it back, and a few minutes later received a message that said: "I didn't know that the same format of the English text could be maintained in Spanish." 

I thought about answering: “You can't. It was my mistake. Next time I'm going to write all in capital letters, without punctuation marks and without separation between words, as in ancient manuscripts.” Obviously, I would never respond that way. In fact, I didn’t respond at all. Why bother?

The incident reminded me of one of my Spanish students at a Denver-area university who, after a class, came to me and said, “Professor, I didn't know that Spanish could be used outside of the classroom. I thought it was like chemistry, something you learn but don't use outside of the classroom."

In what world (in the existential sense) do we live that leads us to assume that the limits of our knowledge are the limits of reality? How ignorant or immature can we become, both personally and globally, to confuse “our reality” with “the” reality (however you want to define it)?

In truth, we may be foolish enough to believe that artificial intelligence is going to destroy us when in fact we don't need artificial intelligence to destroy us because our natural foolishness is already doing it.

As the American biologist Edward Wilson rightly said, “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” 

Given that the Paleolithic era lasted 2.5 million years, perhaps we should pay attention to those emotions instead of focusing only on our postmodern ego.