Economics Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
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| Humans: Humans, or Homo sapiens, are the most intelligent and widespread species of primates. Humans are characterized by bipedalism, large brains, and capacity for articulate speech and abstract reasoning. Humans are social creatures who live in complex societies. See also Society, Reason, Thinking, Brain, Intelligence, Language._____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. | |||
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Nick Bostrom on Humans - Dictionary of Arguments
I 110 Humans/intelligence/biology/capacities/Bostrom: The principal reason for humanity’s dominant position on Earth is that our brains have a slightly expanded set of faculties compared with other animals. I 346 In what sense is humanity a dominant species on Earth? Ecologically speaking, humans are the most common large (~50 kg) animal, but the total human dry biomass (~100 billion kg) is not so impressive compared with that of ants, the family Formicidae (300 billion–3,000 billion kg). Humans and human utility organisms form a very small part (<0.001) of total global biomass. However, croplands and pastures are now among the largest ecosystems on the planet, covering about 35% of the ice-free land surface (Foley et al. 2007)(1). And we appropriate nearly a quarter of net primary productivity according to a typical assessment (Haberl et al. 2007)(2), though estimates range from 3 to over 50% depending mainly on varying definitions of the relevant terms (Haberl et al. 2013)(3). Humans also have the largest geographic coverage of any animal species and top the largest number of different food chains. >Superintelligence/Bostrom. 1. Foley, J. A., Monfreda, C., Ramankutty, N., and Zaks, D. 2007. “Our Share of the Planetary Pie.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104 (31): 12585–6. 2. Haberl, H., Erb, K. H., Krausmann, F., Gaube, V., Bondeau, A., Plutzar, C., Gingrich, S., Lucht, W., and Fischer-Kowalski, M. 2007. “Quantifying and Mapping the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production in Earth’s Terrestrial Ecosystems.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104 (31): 12942–7. 3. Haberl, Helmut, Erb, Karl-Heinz, and Krausmann, Fridolin. 2013. “Global Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP).” Encyclopedia of Earth, September 3._____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition. |
Bostrom I Nick Bostrom Superintelligence. Paths, Dangers, Strategies Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017 |
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