CRAFTING INTELLIGENCE

Humans, from the time it took its first primitive steps towards civilization, have relied on tools – to survive, evolve, make sense of the world around them and to shape that world to their needs. From the first rock hurled at a wild animal in self-defense, to the farmer's sickle, to the hundreds of thousands of lines of code dictating logic inside a robot, humans have used tools to overcome almost all of their shortcomings. Our tool building ability has even slowed down the process of natural selection – instead of letting our genes modify and adapt to surviving in arctic conditions like polar bears over thousands of generations, we skin animals using our tools and wrap ourselves in fur as protection from the cold. All of this has a deeper meaning when contemplating the future of our species. In terms of the way humans worked, the Hunter-Gatherer age lasted tens of thousands of years, the Agricultural Age lasted thousands of years, the Industrial Age lasted just a little over a century and the current Information Age is expected to last only a few decades.