Artificial Intelligence: How Can We Ensure This New Technology Serves Us?

When you look at the mammal that is Homo sapiens in the context of geological time, the approximately 200,000 years we have been around is a tiny, tiny amount of time -- less than 0.005 percent of Earth's existence. And yet, so significant has been our species' impact on the planet, that climatologists and geologists have named our era the Anthropocene epoch, because for the first time in the 4.1-billion-year history of life on Earth we humans, as a species, are changing what happens to and on the planet significantly, rather than simply being the observers and subjects of natural forces. In that 200,000 years since Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa and spread across the planet, we have evolved to become a "reasonably smart" apex primate at the top of the food chain in a closed system called planet Earth. You could argue that we're only "reasonably smart" because whilst we are sentient, have consciousness, self-awareness, intellectual capacity, language, moral reasoning, and the ability to create, we haven't yet figured out how to live without degrading our own environment through pollution, overpopulation, overexploitation of natural resources and species extinction. As we celebrate International Biological Diversity Day this month, it's worth taking stock of where humankind finds itself, and what the future holds for the species at the top of the food chain. Humankind's "reasonable smarts" come courtesy of what might be the most amazingly complex thing in the universe: the human brain.