[ExI] ai is the easy road

[John Clark]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2026 at 2:56 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:


> *> John Clarke opined:*
>

*No, John K Clark (no e) opined, although Arthur E Clark was my father *

*>> …Good point. We are equally close to Bonobos and they are much more
>> peaceful than chimpanzees, and yet the genes for both never left the
>> tropics and today they are nearly extinct in the wild, but human genes are
>> now in the Arctic and Antarctic and everywhere in between; we must have
>> something that they lack. Perhaps Chimpanzees and Bonobos found a ratio
>> between aggression and cooperation that produced a local maximum, but
>> humans found a global maximum that worked well under a large number of very
>> different environmental conditions…*  *John K Clark*
>
>
>
*> The resulting evolved hands with our nifty opposable thumbs works well
> for manipulating weapons and making weapons (because it enables knapped
> flint technology.)*
>

*That's one of the big unsolved mysteries about human evolution. It's clear
from the fossil record that fully bipedal walking evolved before our large
brains did, and that makes sense because a large smart brain wouldn't
increase survival much if you didn't have hands; but what evolutionary
pressure favored bipedal walking?  There are lots of theories but I don't
find any of them particularly convincing. *

*John K Clark  *
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20261017/eb05a35e/attachment.htm>