Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Of course it’s natural to think twice about whether your cell phone truly “knows” a favorite number, your GPS is really “figuring out” the best route home, and your Roomba is genuinely “trying” to clean the floor. But as information-processing systems become more sophisticated—as their representations of the world become richer, their goals are arranged into hierarchies of subgoals within subgoals, and their actions for attaining the goals become more diverse and less predictable—it starts to look like hominid chauvinism to insist that they don’t. (Whether information and computation explain consciousness, in addition to knowledge, intelligence, and purpose, is a question I’ll turn to in the final chapter.)

Human intelligence remains the benchmark for the artificial kind, and what makes Homo sapiens an unusual species is that our ancestors invested in bigger brains that collected more information about the world, reasoned about it in more sophisticated ways, and deployed a greater variety of actions to achieve their goals. They specialized in the cognitive niche, also called the cultural niche and the hunter-gatherer niche.¹⁴ This embraced a suite of new adaptations, including the ability to manipulate mental models of the world and predict what would happen if one tried out new things; the ability to cooperate with others, which allowed teams of people to accomplish what a single person could not; and language, which allowed them to coordinate their actions and to pool the fruits of their experience into the collections of skills and norms we call cultures.¹⁵ These investments allowed early hominids to defeat the defenses of a wide range of plants and animals and reap the bounty in energy, which stoked their expanding brains, giving them still more know-how and access to still more energy. A well-studied contemporary hunter-gatherer tribe, the Hadza of Tanzania, who live in the ecosystem where modern humans first evolved and probably preserve much of their lifestyle, extract 3,000 calories daily per person from more than 880 species.¹⁶ They create this menu through ingenious and uniquely human ways of foraging, such as felling large animals with poison-tipped arrows, smoking bees out of their hives to steal their honey, and enhancing the nutritional value of meat and tubers by cooking them.

Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny. The invention of farming around ten thousand years ago multiplied the availability of calories from cultivated plants and domesticated animals, freed a portion of the population from the demands of hunting and gathering, and eventually gave them the luxury of writing, thinking, and accumulating their ideas. Around 500 BCE, in what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, several widely separated cultures pivoted from systems of ritual and sacrifice that merely warded off misfortune to systems of philosophical and religious belief that promoted selflessness and promised spiritual transcendence.¹⁷ Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia, Second Temple Judaism in Judea, and classical Greek philosophy and drama emerged within a few centuries of one another. (Confucius, Buddha, Pythagoras, Aeschylus, and the last of the Hebrew prophets walked the earth at the same time.) Recently an interdisciplinary team of scholars identified a common cause.¹⁸ It was not an aura of spirituality that descended on the planet but something more prosaic: energy capture. The Axial Age was when agricultural and economic advances provided a burst of energy: upwards of 20,000 calories per person per day in food, fodder, fuel, and raw materials. This surge allowed the civilizations to afford larger cities, a scholarly and priestly class, and a reorientation of their priorities from short-term survival to long-term harmony. As Bertolt Brecht put it millennia later: Grub first, then ethics.¹⁹

When the Industrial Revolution released a gusher of usable energy from coal, oil, and falling water, it launched a Great Escape from poverty, disease, hunger, illiteracy, and premature death, first in the West and increasingly in the rest of the world (as we shall see in chapters 5–8). And the next leap in human welfare—the end of extreme poverty and spread of abundance, with all its moral benefits—will depend on technological advances that provide energy at an acceptable economic and environmental cost to the entire world (chapter 10).

Entro, evo, info. These concepts define the narrative of human progress: the tragedy we were born into, and our means for eking out a better existence.