All Life on Earth

Josephine Salmons knew immediately that the fossilized skull on her friend's mantle belonged to an ape, but since she wasn’t able to identify the species, she had a hunch it could be a species that was extinct. The skull had been found during the blasting of a limestone cliff at Taung, South Africa and was taken home as a curiosity by her friend’s father, a manager at Rand Mines Limited. It was common for fossils to be found in the mined limestone Tufa in South Africa, but none that had so far been found were quite like this one.

Her chance dinner with a friend precipitated one of the most significant discoveries in anthropology. Salmons was an anatomy student demonstrator at the University of Witwatersrand in the mid 1920’s, and so she brought the fossil to Raymond Dart, one of her anatomy professors. Dart also recognized its uniqueness, eventually proclaiming it as a new species of hominid which Dart named Australopithecus Africanus.

As a result of the geographic location where it had been found, Dart suggested that Africa rather than Asia was the Cradle of Humankind. After many decades of debate in the scientific community, mounting evidence convinced the initial skeptics.

Discoveries such as this one have provided some insight into the minds and capabilities of extinct and but there are many places where questions still remain: When we think of intelligence, what do we include? Are plants intelligent? How about viruses? What separates humans from any other living thing?

Philosophers have debated our place in the world of living things for millennia, and scientists have added a wealth of knowledge to the conversation. The capabilities of other life forms we discover keep astounding us. They might be very different from us, like the nearly immortal tardigrade that can survive dessication, extreme heat and cold, radiation, pressure and starvation, or octopi whose complex nervous system is only partially confined to the brain and can “see” by touch.

However, humans share some of our more cherished traits with other species on Earth, suggesting, we have at least a partially shared experience with our evolutionary relatives. We sometimes share surprising similarities, like bees’ ability to understand zero, or plants that respond to anesthesia. But do we consider these traits fundamental to our humanity? We sometimes find the parallels uncomfortable: Chimpanzees creating up with swear words close in meaning to ours, birds using their common language to lie to others, zebras murdering their kin, and elephants grieving dead loved ones.

In some cases we find things that are uniquely human. Theories about why this is so are oftentimes incomplete or controversial. Where do mysteries still remain?

From early in history, humans wanted to build machines that shared some of these traits. Sometimes the machines we build mimic our abilities, like the time-saving washing machine frees up time for other tasks. But what about machines that mimic human cognition and attempts to create stories, poetry and art?

Machine Learning is a new paradigm of design that allows technology to improve based on data - learning and becoming better. How will this affect some of the new kinds of machines we want to build like self-driving cars, AI assistants and concierges, and chess opponents?

Next: Feast and Famine