From Apes to Cyborgs
This English version of the excellent essay in Italian La scimmia vestita: dalle tribù di primati all’intelligenza artificiale (The Dressed Monkey: from primate tribes to artificial intelligence) published by Carocci Editore in 2018, about which I wrote in this column (Il Nuovo Saggiatore, vol. 34, N. 5-6 (2018)), is something more than a simple translation. The rapid progress in both paleoanthropological and artificial intelligence research is reflected in numerous and timely updates, illustrated by references to more recent works, which bring the impressive bibliography to about 380 titles. It is a work capable of satisfying, at the same time, the general reader, thanks to a simple and compelling writing, as well as the specialist able to delve into the vast literature cited. Claudio Tuniz’s fruitful collaboration with Patrizia Tiberi Vipraio has a widely appreciated precedent in Homo sapiens: Una biografia non autorizzata, also published by Carocci Editore (2015) and translated into English as Humans: an Unauthorized Biography (Springer, 2016). In this book, the lineage and biodiversity of man, clothing, the process of self-domestication and the march for hegemony, the feminine origin of language and culture, nutrition, diseases, hominid life and cults are synthetically exposed. Everything contributes to the development of the brain, imagination and creativity, symbolic language, economics and scientific knowledge, up to the extraordinary recent development, almost instantaneous compared to the duration of previous eras. From here we move on to hypotheses on the technological future, made up of digital networks, artificial intelligence and robots, neural networks, intelligent weapons and so on.
It is a fact that the imagined technological development, while having a generalized impact, is understood by an ever smaller percentage of people. If, on the one hand, the evolution of law has passed from the tribal to the national and therefore global scale, and thus the sharing of power has passed from the ancient demigod monarchs to modern democracies, on the other hand the sharing of knowledge keeps lagging behind, having the time scale of scientific progress become much shorter than that of law and politics.
For all imaginable mathematical models, supercomputers, neuronal networks and artificial intelligence, that growing gap is making it difficult to predict the future based on our distant and recent past. Of course, assuming that there is a future for a Homo that is rapidly turning from sapiens into insipiens, to the point of destroying its own natural habitat. Readers will find a possible follow-up in the conference “Facing the anthropocene: discussions on our future” that Tuniz held in Trieste in September 2020 at the opening of the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) and reproduced in the latest issue of Il Nuovo Saggiatore (vol. 36, N. 5-6, 2020). In this discussion there is also the disturbing experience of covid-19, itself attributable, at least in part, to the aforementioned insipience.
The future of our species on this Earth is a theme that alarms scientists more and more, and finds expression and concern also in some recent essays in Italy. I cite in particular, and recommend, the impressive recent book by Gianfranco Pacchioni, L’Ultimo Sapiens - Viaggio al termine della nostra specie (with the preface by Telmo Pievani), published in 2019 by Il Mulino.
As for the present English edition of the book by Claudio Tuniz and Patrizia Tiberi Vipraio, there holds what the great theorist of political economy Frank Stilwell wrote of the previous Humans (J. Austral. Polit. Econ., Vol. 79, Winter 2017): “This great little book deserves to be read by all people concerned to understand where we, as a species, came from and how the challenges we now face reflect that long historical evolution”.
Giorgio Benedek
Università di Milano-Bicocca
- Claudio Tuniz, Patrizia Tiberi Vipraio
- From Apes to Cyborgs
- New Perspectives on Human Evolution
- Springer Praxis Books. Springer Nature, 2020
- softcover: pp. 174; € 23,91
- ISBN 978-3-030-36521-9
- e-book: € 18,18
- ISBN 978-3-030-36522-6