Homo Ratiocinator (Reckoning Human)

Homo Sapiens, “wise human” in Latin, is the taxonomic species name for modern humans. But observing the current state of the world and its trajectory, it is hard for me to accept the description “wise.” I am not the first to object to the “sapiens” descriptor. The French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson argued in 1911 that a better term would be Homo Faber, referring to human tool-making ability. This ability goes back to early humans, about three million years ago. Most importantly, human tools got better and better due to innovation and cultural transmission. I’d like to offer an alternative: Homo Rationcinator,^a,b or reckoning human—where reckoning refers to both reasoning and computing.

In 2018, scientists reported the discovery of 50,000-year-old cave art—consisting of a depiction of a wild pig and a trio of human figures—in the Indonesian island of Borneo. This is the first example we have of symbolic representation by humans. Eventually, tool making and symbolic representation led to counting tools. The Lebombo Bone is a bone tool made of a baboon fibula with incised markings, discovered in a cave in the Lebombo Mountains in Africa. More than 40,000 years old, the bone is conjectured to be a tally stick, its 29 notches counting, perhaps, the days of the lunar phase. Humans had developed a tool for computing. Our destiny had been laid out, and computing tools continued to improve.

Around 2,500 B.C., the Sumerians invented the abacus, a manual tool for arithmetical computing. (A pebble of an abacus is called a calculus, in Latin.) In the 1670s, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed his Step Reckoner, a machine capable of addition and multiplication. In 1820, Charles Babbage developed his Difference Engine. His Analytical Engine was a proposed digital mechanical general-purpose computer. While it was never actually built, the proposal gave birth to the idea of a general-purpose programmable computer. Ada Lovelace, Babbage’s collaborator, believed that computers could become much more than calculators, including composing “elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”

As I have argued^c before, the development of computing and mathematics dovetailed each other. Deductive mathematics was developed by the Greeks in the 7^th Century B.C. A few hundred years later, Aristotle formalized the rules of reasoning in deductive mathematics, and logic was born. In the 13^th century, the Catalan monk Ramon Lull, wishing to use logic to convert the entire world to Christianity, invented the so-called Lull’s Circles, the first mechanical aid to reasoning. In the 17^th century, British philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that reasoning is a form of computing. Leibniz, inspired by Lull, dreamed of Calculus Ratiocinator, a reasoning machine that could augment human intelligence.

In the 19^th century, George Boole developed an algebraic treatment of logic, giving us Boolean Logic, and William Stanley Jeavons showed how to build Boolean logic machines. Claude Shannon showed in the 20^th century how to use Boolean Logic for electrical-circuit design. The stage was set for the development of the programmable, electronic, digital computer around the middle of the 20^th century. By the early 1950s, dozens of “Johniacs”—computers named after John von Neumann—were built around the world. Leibniz’s dream came true. We went from reasoning, to patterns of reasoning, to logic, to computers, to computers that reason. So, reasoning human, reckoning human, and tool-making human are now making tools that can compute and reason, opening the door to intelligent machines, or artificial intelligence (AI).

Asimov’s I Robot was published as a book in 1950. The overarching theme is the complicated interaction of humans, robots, and morality. Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, also published in 1950, warned us that “The machine’s danger to society is not from the machine itself but from what man makes of it.” But we plunged ahead with AI research, paying little attention to societal impact.

Leibniz’s goal for his calculus ratiocinator was “mankind will then possess a new instrument that will enhance the capabilities of the mind to a far greater extent than optical instruments strengthen the eyes.” Ada Lovelace wished computing technology to be “for the most effective use of mankind.” But Silicon Valley, today’s leading engine driving computing technology, is motivated solely by profit maximization, the common good be damned. After 40,000 years of making tools for computing and reasoning, it is time, I believe, for Homo Ratiocinator to live up to its traditional name, Homo Sapiens—building machines to augment, not replace, human intelligence.