On the news recently:-
The Garamba national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo had a population of over 22000 elephants at one time, now it has less than 1500. The reason for this dramatic decline is fueled by man’s obsession with the need to accumulate. There is in China an incessant demand by the nouveau riche for ornaments which are regarded as status symbols. Elephants are being massacred in their thousands for their ivory, by poachers using helicopters and machine guns. The dead animals are then mutilated by chainsaw to remove the tusks. The perpetrators sell the tusks on the black market. Each dead elephant is worth anything up to $350,000.
In the same news program an achievement was heralded as the breakthrough of the century for artificial intelligence. After millions of hours research and even more millions of dollars spent, a computer has managed to beat a man at the ancient Chinese game of Go.
Ironically the pieces of this game would originally have been made out of ivory, but the board used for the challenge utilized perfectly serviceable plastic tiles.
There has been an international ban on ivory trading now for many years, but there are still people in China who want to create hideous ornaments from a material which, to the untrained eye, is almost indistinguishable from Phenolic resin, the type of plastic used for snooker balls.
When William Shakespeare wrote those lines :-
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
He thought he was predicting the imminent approach of Macbeth, but those words written back in the 17th century have a much more poignant meaning.
Without knowing it he prophesied a future where we have intelligence enough to create machines cleverer than humans, but humans are not clever enough to work out how to stop the mindless slaughter of innocent animals in order to manufacture tasteless gaudy status symbols.
Perhaps we should devote our time developing a machine to control human stupidity.
Read more about elephant poaching here