Digital Divide By Muhammad Bilal Chughtai

Humanity Goes Down

Humanity means three different things: a species; a behavior, and a global identity. The historical relationship between these different dimensions of humanity has been elegantly discussed by the late Bruce Mazlish in his 2009 book the thought of Humanity during a Global Era and it's important to differentiate between these three aspects of being human as we prepare to satisfy as a worldwide humanitarian movement once more.

Humanity as species:

The first meaning of humanity describes a specific quite animal that biologists encouragingly call Homo sapiens – or wise human – and which seems distinct from all other animals because of its powers of language, reasoning, imagination, and technology. This biological and evolutionary use of the term has an equivalent meaning as “humankind” and marks us out as a specific body that's different from other forms of animal and vegetative life.

The power of the human species is considerable over the non-human world. This is mainly because our intelligence has consistently invented and deployed tools and technology which suggests we've come to dominate the world, and our imagination has shaped religious and political meanings around which we form competing interests and social movements.

Our tools mean we aren't an easy species but always function as a hybrid species – part human and part technology – during a constantly changing mixture of human and non-human components. This hybrid humanity must infuriate non-human lifelike lions and microbes who could easily “take us down” during a fair fight of straightforward life forms, but who have consistently encountered us in hybrid forms during which we merge our humanity with spears, guns, horses, cars, vaccines, and antibiotics.

We operate routinely in these human-machine interactions (HMI) of varied kinds. I am doing it now typing on my Macbook Air with an electric fan to keep me cool on a hot summer’s day. Our mechanization gives us exponential power and an unfair advantage over non-human life forms both large and microscopic, which tend to stay simple in one form apart from bacteria and viruses, our most threatening predators, which may change shape relatively fast.

Our essential hybridity with other animals, plant, and machine life is now within the emergent stages of an enormous leap towards new sorts of power which we cannot envision. New applications of biotech, robotics, and AI (AI) means that our hybrid humanity is close to expanding exponentially in a way that's already changing what it means to be human. Today’s technologists are focused hard on simplifying human-machine interfaces – differing types of “dashboards” which use our five human senses and recognize human gestures in order that our humanity interacts seamlessly with AI of various kinds. These interfaces will increasingly be embedded in our bodies and minds as new levels of interactivity with technology can inevitably change the experience of being human and therefore the power of humanity.

Technology will not just change us where we are but also change where we can be. Humanity is going to be enhanced in time and space but also relocated across time and space. For example, because I'm on Twitter or Skype, I can already be visibly present elsewhere, speaking and responding in thousands of various places across time and space. This is radically different from my great grandparent who could only ever really be visible and engaged in one place on just one occasion, or in two places at two times when someone distant was reading a letter from her.

This time-space compression and its resulting context collapse which began with radio and tv is an ever-increasing feature of being human. Some of our grandchildren will probably be talking and listening simultaneously during a hundred different places directly in embodied replicas as holograms or humanoid drones. They will probably be fluent altogether languages, move through space much faster than us and live forever on earth and in space due to biological and AI enhancements. Our machines will develop new levels of autonomy which, although created by humans, are inevitably adapted by machine learning into new sorts of non-human and non-animal life.

This all means the facility of humanity as a species is close to increasing dramatically due to a revolution in human-machine interaction which can see new sorts of hybridity beyond our current imagining. Our human power will become even greater but what about our wisdom and therefore the way we use this new power of humanity? In short, what about the ethics of our behaviour in our new hybrid humanity?

Humanity as ethical behaviour:

We now come to the second meaning of humanity which is employed to explain a particular moral value that we will see operating across humankind as kindness and compassion for each other. We can therefore understand this second meaning because of the kindness of humans. This humanity is our first fundamentals and first purpose within the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and has been summarized as follows since 1965:

“To prevent and alleviate human suffering wherever it's going to be found (and) to guard life and health and ensure respect for the person .”

This principle of humanity is that the fundamental value at play in every Red Cross and Red Crescent worker wherever they're within the world today. If you stop during an ll|one amongst|one in every of" one among them in whatever they're doing – taking blood donations in a major city, organizing relief in war or disaster, or negotiating with diplomats in the UN Security Council – and ask them why they're doing it, all them should simply answer: “I am trying to guard life and health and ensure respect for human beings.”

This is humanity in action and it's the facility of this humanity – humane behaviour towards other humans – that we seek to celebrate, improve and increase in our Movement’s 33rd International Conference in December.

Humanity during this sense is human behaviour that cares for other humans due to a profound and universally held conviction that life is best than death, which to measure well means being treated humanely in relationships of mutual respect. This commitment may be a driving principle within the rules of behaviour within the Geneva Conventions, whose 70th anniversary falls this year, and within the Disaster Laws recommended by the Movement to make sure better disaster prevention, preparedness and response around the world.

The Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is directly symbol, advocate and embodiment of this ethic of humanity than are consistently working emotionally, judicially and practically to extend humanity as a dominant sort of human behaviour in extreme situations. This is tough, of course, because the human species is ethically ambivalent and not simply driven by an ethic of humanity. We also are deeply competitive, cruel and violent as a species and sometimes believe that some things we've constructed are far more important than particular human lives. The reason that the decision for humanity is so loud is that our record of inhumanity is goodbye, and therefore the power of inhumanity is usually greater than the power of humanity.

And what of humanity’s behaviour towards non-human life? In our era of the climate crisis, environmental degradation and multiple species extinction, the moral principle of humanity is looking increasingly self-referential and incomplete as a primary ethic for the human species. Quite simply, it is not enough for humans only to be kind to humans.
The principle of humanity as currently expressed may be a classic example of speciesism in ethics. It cares only about one species – our own. We may claim that the principle of humanity may be a niche ethic for calamitous human situations which rightly trumps wider ethical considerations in extremis, but this is often neither true nor realistic. It is not true because the principle of humanity already takes account of the natural environment within the laws of war and therefore the norms of disaster response then recognize the importance of non-human life in its title and as means to human life. Nor is it realistic at a time when our biggest existential challenge as a species arises from our relationship with the non-human world around us.

The principle of humanity must, therefore, keep step with the moral evolution of humanity (the species) and wishes to expand its purpose and behaviour towards non-human life. This currently includes all animal and vegetative life. But, in future, it's increasingly also likely to incorporate non-human machines like robots and AI which can develop their own levels of consciousness, feelings and rights as they increasingly merge with humanity – the species and its ethics – in hybrid forms.
Here time is pressing. We may have little time to figure out what it means to use humane behaviour within non-human machines and towards non-human machines. This means agreeing how non-human machines and new models of human-machine interactions can behave with humanity, especially as new weapons systems. It will also mean brooding about how we should always show humanity to increasingly machine-like humans and human-like machines.
We may have even less time to think hard about what it means to point out humanity to non-human environments and animals within the Movement’s humanitarian norms and work. At the instant, our humanitarian action is often profoundly inhumane to non-human life, neither protecting nor respecting it.

With all this uncertainty about what exactly it's going to mean to be human in future and therefore the persistent record of our inhumanity to every other and towards non-human life, what sense does it make to undertake to aspire to one global identity as billions of human beings?

Humanity as a global identity:

Over the last 200 years, the 3rd sense of humanity has increasingly mentioned one global identity across all human societies. This is not an easy biological identity but the thought that as a conflicted species we will and must build one global political identity during which every human has a stake. This global identity may be a meta identity which transcends smaller identities shaped by culture, nation, class, political opinion and religion.

The purpose of this single political humanity is to create a person's “we” during which can share a standard species consciousness together group sharing one planetary “home” and so work together on common problems and customary opportunities that face the entire of humanity.

This political sense of being one global group is experiencing push-back today as a broad-based politics of ethnic and economic nationalism expresses scepticism about the globalism of all types. This political turn sees many of us asking national politicians to think “more about us here” and “less about them over there”. But our Movement continues to argue that it's important to imagine and build a worldwide sense of humanity because our common human problems are intense and interdependent, and can only be solved internationally not just nationally.

There are five truly existential problems that we all share as members of the human species, and always have done. Threats from all are often significantly reduced if we work together to unravel them within the spirit of Dumas’ Three Musketeers: “all for one and one for all”. This is what we attempt to do at the International Conference. Our perennial five problems are:

1.  The matter of our violence as a species because it plays out terribly in war and violent crime.

2. Our struggle for fairness and our desire to scale back inequalities between us.

3. Our predators and their threat to our health which now take mainly microscopic form as infectious microbes, or chronic and autoimmune diseases during which we attack ourselves.

4. Our relationship with the non-human environment and its impact on human survival.

5. The Promethean risk of our creativity and the way our technological inventions help and harm as they modify the planet around us and redefine humanity itself in new hybrid forms.

These five deep species problems will all be raised in various forms at our Conference in December. They will require a strong response by all humanity, with an ethic of humanity, to make sure the survival of humanity.