Artificial Intelligence and Dumb Societies

As the civilized world with its ruthless knowledge society races to the frightening frontiers of artificial intelligence, one cannot but shudder at the fate of dumb societies stranded at the level of Industrial Evolution.  Dumb societies are perpetual victims of human civilization; perennial subjects in the dialectic of historical development.

While the knowledge society is increasingly resorting to robots to perform complicated chores, the denizens of dumb societies are famously looking like robots de-humanized to a point where they can no longer boast of elementary social intelligence. These are the sites of the most horrific crimes against humanities in recent times. And it can get worse. Robotized humanity is no match for human robots.

This is because robotized people become so de-sensitized that they cannot get the political or social order right. They are ruled by a primitive conclave bypassed by human evolution everywhere else. They must leave in order for the societies held hostage to live. But leaving is often a complicated and messy departure, complicated by human ambition to dominate and the vagaries of colonial cartography.

Artificial intelligence is the product of human intelligence at its cutting edge. The complicated mathematics is not for the rote learner or note-regurgitating professors. It demands thinking out of the box. In order to access higher civilization, humanity must strive to continually humanize nature by conquering and dominating it with weapons fashioned by human brains.

But when nature strikes back to dominate humanity all the gains of human evolution are steadily reversed. The result is petrified humanity; dumb societies at the end of their historic tethers, gripped by superstitious idiocies and primitive rituals. Anybody who has seen a tsunami in action will appreciate the futility of sacrifice or sea-worship in the face of climatological adversity. Future archaeologists of human derailment will have a field day assembling evidence of civilizational collapse.

The disruptive influence of scientific advances and artificial intelligence will soon be here with us. For dumb societies that are unable to find work for their teeming workforce, the labour market will shrink dramatically. Certain mundane chores will be taken over by robots. Robots will perform medical operations and point-device car repairs. Petroleum predation such as beloved by the Nigerian ruling class will cease because there will be no buyers. Keeping stolen money in bank vaults will become a vain and forlorn exercise. The only capital you need is human capital.

Sometimes the technological advancement works to the benefit of everybody such as when backward and laggard societies are driven to parlay the gains of scientific revolution occurring elsewhere to the advantage of their moribund societies. For example, the GSM revolution which is not indigenous to Nigeria has allowed the nation to leapfrog the Age of landlines to the Age of Mobile technology.

After decades of stealing money meant for developing telecommunication infrastructure, the Nigerian ruling class was granted a fortuitous reprieve by developments elsewhere. The Age of mobile phones has led to a dramatic expansion of Nigeria’s telecommunication infrastructure in a way and manner that could not have been foretold.

But it has come at a terrible price. Or let us say it has been a mere displacement of contending national pathologies. Despite the GSM revolution, Nigeria remains one of the few countries with such a volume of communication without a functioning land line. With the help of massive government infrastructure, this remains the only technology that would have made telephone easily available to the teeming masses.

Since people must communicate anyhow, Nigeria’s lower social masses often resort to all manner of outlandish underhand deals in order to procure the magic mobile set. This ranges from black market shenanigans to outright stealing thus fuelling the national pathology of corruption and sleaze from a totally unanticipated direction.

When you ask an average workman how he came by his expensive mobile set, he is likely to respond that “Oga, God is in control”, thus echoing the infamous “Se debrouiller”—or we dey manage—slogan of Mobutu’s Zaire. The security personnel guarding you by the daylight is probably an armed robber by the night. You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam.

Yet it is not as if God designated some races as special people or branded some nations with the stamp of extraordinary genius. If anything, the Brexit debacle and the wayward inanities of the British House of Commons as well as the untoward advent of Donald Trump in America have shown the world that no nation or human society has a monopoly of malignant ineptitude or social turpitude. This time around, the western old boys’ network or what has been famously dismissed as a “chumocracy”, has truly scraped the bottom of the barrel.

What these “special people” or genius nations had going for them for a long time is militant self-belief and the power of transformative ideas. When the Portuguese arrived at the old African Congo kingdom around the middle of the fifteenth century, they met a society that was far more socially and politically advanced and ethically sophisticated than the one they left behind at home.

They loitered around a bit hoping to make contact with the mysterious military force that undergirded such a mighty empire. Alas, there was no such thing and within the next hundred years or so, most of the inhabitants were captured and transported as slaves to the new colony of Brazil through the new slave port of Luanda. The rest is history.

It has been noted that the Brits behaved very much like ill-informed thugs and low-grade hustlers in their Indian and African colonial possessions. But this does not tell the whole story. They were thugs and hustlers with militant self-belief and a sense of modernizing mission. At a point during the famous revolt by the native Indians that lasted for one year from 1857, the rebels had the entire British Raj with their back to the wall.

But the Indians lacked the power of militant self-belief and a transformative ideology to push their rebellion to its logical conclusion. They could not have returned to the splendid decay of their superannuated feudal regimen or their monkey deities. They proclaimed an eighty one year old doddering Urdu prince as the new Raj of “Hindustan” and that was all.

This failure of mission allowed the British to rally and to slaughter the rebels with appalling cruelty and callousness reminiscent of the Spanish destruction of the Inca civilization. Men are hanged not because horses are stolen, but so that horses may not be stolen.

What made the difference between medieval Europe and their later overseas possessions was the Age of Enlightenment with its power of radically transforming ideas about the destiny of humanity and the place of humankind in the universe. The splendid irony of the Age of Enlightenment was the fact that it was the sacking of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks which led to the influx of philosophers, astrologers, astronomers, scientists and engineers to Europe. Their enlightening ideas allowed Europe to overcome the Dark Age of medieval tyranny and institutional cruelties.

The Age of Enlightenment had its twists and turns. In one of its most amusing turns, it was said that Empress Catherine of Russia, immediately after the death of her husband, sought the help of European philosophers and thinkers to bring feudal Russia at par with European countries in terms of freedom and liberation, particularly as far as the vexed Serf Question was concerned.

The relic of Peter the Great was torn between severe repression as was prevalent in Russia which could trigger a revolution or graduated freedom which could bring chaos and anarchy. The lot of Enlightenment mentor duly fell on Denis Diderot, the great French thinker and philosopher. Diderot arrived in Moscow in freezing winter with his bones creaking. The impish and gamey Catherine duly noted to confidantes that she had to put a chair between herself and the Frenchman to prevent his wild gesticulations from reaching the most delicate part of her anatomy.

In the event, it was the subsequent French Revolution that provided practical answer to the Serf Question as hordes of absconding French noblemen and priests sought refuge in the Russian capital. The Russian bear recoiled in terror at the prospects of human liberation. It would take another century and a few decades for a group of indigenous Russian intellectuals who had internalized the lessons of European Enlightenment and had given it a peculiarly brutal local stamp to kick-start the Russian Revolution.

In all this, the only thing that separates dumb societies from successful societies is militant self-belief and the power of transformative ideas. This has been the case from time immemorial depending on the stage of human evolution. The battle of batons among European countries in almost a thousand years reflects this balance of intellectual forces with Portugal and Spain taking early lead as Holland, Britain, France, Germany and the Nordic countries gradually overhauled them.

In the past six hundred years of relentless global decline, Africa as a continent has experienced this surge of militant self-belief and transformative ideas only once and it was during the decades of independence struggle which lasted from the forties till the nineties of the last century.

This was the epoch of the decolonizing project which induced self-belief in Africans and produced a crop of transformative African leaders such as Zik, Awolowo, Nkrumah, Senghor, Nyerere, Lumumba, Cabral, Neto, Samora Michel, Nasser and Nelson Mandela. Their sense of mission and vision provided the ideological leitmotif for the transformation of a much-abused continent.

Unfortunately as postcolonial stasis settled in on most African countries, the militant self-belief disappeared and the power of transformative idea waned. Africa became the Dark Continent once again. Nigeria, which by virtue of its population and prodigious human capital was supposed to serve as the hub of Black renaissance, disappeared into a long night of military despotism and feudal tyranny from which it is yet to recover. Africa itself is yet to wake from the historical nightmare of global irrelevance. A lost continent is waiting for its lost country.