(Twenty-minute read)

Before we get started let’s try and explain the dating system of History.

Why?

Because people of different cultures and belief systems should be able to access and discuss history without having to date it according to the Christian belief in Jesus as the son of God and the messiah.

In order to date, a present event from a past event one must know when that past event occurred.

We have BCE/CE rather than BC/AD – Before Christ/Anno Dominior – Year of Our Lord.

 BCE/CE makes no sense because it refers to exactly the same event as BC/AD.

BC/AD also has no year zero but does not need one because it is not claiming to date history from a specific event.

After the time of Christ” or “in the common era” which eventually came to be written simply as “common era” and then CE which gave rise to BCE in defining events prior to the common era.

BCE/CE continues to be used because it is more accurate than BC/AD so forgive me for using both.

1. First humans communicated only through speaking and picture drawings.
2. 3000 B.C., the Sumerians in Mesopotamia (what is today southern Iraq) devised cuniform (shapes)
3. Around 2000 B.C., Phoenicians created symbols ancient Egyptian writing is known as hieroglyphics
4. The Greeks later adopted the Phoenician alphabet and added vowels.
5. The Romans gave the letters Latin names to create the alphabet we use today.
6. Around 875 A.D., the concept of zero was developed.

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Your birth as there would be no history for you if not born.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus 484 BC – ca.425 BC has generally been acclaimed as the “father of history”.

Or was it the birth of Temujin c.1162 who DNA is in 16 million men alive today.

Sitting Bull, Lakota Tatanka Iyotake, born c. 1831.

It is said that the events in history alter the lives of mankind, and human civilization never remains the same after that. The history of the world is the memory of the past.

So was it, Plato born in 428/427 BCE, or Socrates who sought the impartial arbitration of a “thinking machine.” AI, credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy in c. 470 – 399 BC (which is probably only an inference from…Plato or  Aristotle born in 384 BC.)

In July 356 BC. Alexander the Great was born a military genius he was educated by the philosopher Aristotle.

Or was it Confucius born in 551 BCE considered as one of the most important and influential individuals in shaping human history.

Whoever it was the understanding of the linkages between past and present is absolutely basic for a good understanding of the condition of being human.

It is not just ‘useful’, it is essential. All people and peoples are living histories.

It is also essential for ‘rooting’ people in time. And why should that matter?

The answer is that people who feel themselves to be rootless live rootless lives, often causing a lot of damage to themselves and others in the process.

It took a long unfolding history to get everything to NOW.

Was it 11,000 years ago, with the invention of porridge or to put it differently, the first of at least five separate moments when farming was discovered, that is the planting and selection of cereal planting and selection of cereals, alongside the tethering of some animals. It meant that people stopped being nomadic hunters, and human populations grew, trapping farmers with more mouths to feed.

It also meant tooth decay, bad backs and a lot of very boring work. But without it, there would have been no villages, towns – no empires, no cars, no moon landing, no history, really, at all. And, of course, with GM foods and fish farms, it’s an ancient story that hasn’t stopped. In his book Sapiens: ( A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari states that we were all conned by a plant called Wheat.)

Anyway!

3500 AD the wheel was invented.

Prophet Muhammad Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim, born after his father’s death in Mecca, Arabia, around c. 570  giving birth to Islam as a religion.

Jesus was born in 3 or 2 B.C.

Julius Caesar was born in Rome on 12 or 13 July 100 BC.

With the final fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD came the dark ages which led to a complete deterioration of the Roman culture. The progressed and developed culture (law, architecture, literature, government, etc.) of the Roman Empire was lost forever.

850AD Gunpower was invented.

The Earth grew colder, and the world is plunged into a cold, pitch-black, chaotic hell with the Black Plague just suddenly appeared in Europe in the 1300s.

The Song dynasty in China that began in 960c lasted until 1279.

What happened? Where did all of the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans go? Why did people forget how to read and write and sculpt and build?

There was no one factor that we can pin as the cause of the Dark Ages a period from about the 6th to the 10th century CE. Now referred to as the Middle Ages it is a time of superstition, a stagnant decadent ghettoed holocaust for anyone who is not a noble or a priest, ridden with illiteracy, disease, war, and poverty, into the minds of the masses.

1066. William the Conqueror a normans from France invade England.

Around 1552 Walter Raleigh was born he has been credited with bringing potatoes and tobacco back to Britain, although both of these were already known via the Spanish. In 1616, he went off to search for El Dorado, never found it and got executed on 29 October 1618.

Out of this came Colonialism, Imperialism and Slavery, Capitalism with the Industrial Revolution.

There is no doubt that colonialism had a major effect on the entire world followed by the Reformation. It triggered off the American Revolutionary War. Great Britain lost one of its most important colony, and all the participating nations suffered economic losses with the American Revolution influence the French Revolution to a great extent.

1642 Isaac Newton born.

Napoleon Bonaparte born on August 15, 1769, uprooted the old concepts of aristocracy and hierarchy. (Pasteur As ) Germ Theory of Disease.

Samuel Morse born April 27, 1791, invented the telegraph system.

Newton’s theory of gravity in 1798  took place 111 years after the publication of Newton’s Principia and approximately 71 years after his death before we all came down to the ground.

1884 the machine gun.

On 19 March 1813, David Livingstone was born. In October 1871 found Stanley in Africa with the famous phrase: ‘Dr Livingstone I presume?’

Alexander Graham Bell was born on 3 March 1847 credited with inventing the telephone.

On July 1, 1858, Charles Darwin put forth the theory of Natural Selection.

Henry Ford, born July 30, 1863  “You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.”

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov was born near St Petersburg on 18 May 1868.

On 6 June 1868, Robert Falcon Scott was born. Beaten to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen.

Guglielmo Marconi

Ernest Henry Shackleton was born on 15 February 1874 died of a heart attack off South Georgia.

Pasteur’s a Microbiologist 1877 to 1887 presents the germ theory revolutionized biology and medicine.

1879 Albert Einstein born.

Adolf Hitler is Born at 6:30 p.m. on the evening of April 20, 1889. He rose to power as the chancellor of Germany in 1933, and as Führer in 1934.

World War I lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918 it killed 16 million people—soldiers and civilians alike giving rise to the Russian Revolution and the Second World War. It helped to spread one of the world’s deadliest global pandemics, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people.

World War II September 1st, 1939 was the deadliest war in human history, with over 75 million deaths all over the world. Two Atom bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki contributed to ending of the war on May 7, 1945, after which the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or the Soviet Union) was formed, emerged as a superpower.

Germany was occupied by the Allies and the Soviet army.

However, the failing relations of the Soviet Union with the other Allies ultimately resulted in the division of Germany, and building of the Berlin Wall (also a symbol of the ‘Iron Curtain’)

The Cold War and the arms race was the indirect effects of the war, that were to define world politics for many years to come.

Titanic sinks. At 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912.

In 1925 the first Television.

Donald Trump is born on June 14, 1946.

1947 the Kalashnikova.

In 1953 the structure of DNA was a discovery with the field of artificial intelligence research founded as an academic discipline in 1956.

1954, Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute.

ON 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union inaugurates the “Space Age” with its launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite and the start of the internet. Almost one-third of the world’s 6.8 billion people use the internet regularly today.

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became both the first person in the world to enter space and the first person to orbit the Earth.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

Viking 1 was launched on August 20, 1975, and the second craft, Viking 2, was launched on September 9, 1975.

On September 5, 1977, Voyager I was launched and Voyager 11 on August 20, 1977. 

On July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Apollo 11 Lunar Module (LM) pilot Buzz Aldrin became the first people to land on the Moon. Bill Gates and Microsoft got their start in 1975.

MS Windows debuts in 1983.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and Reunification of Germany on November 9, 1989. marked the end of the Cold War, and the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union.

Hubble’s launch and deployment in April 1990 marked the most significant advance in astronomy since Galileo’s telescope 400 years ago.

On 20 November 1998 International Space Station starts to get built.

The European Union (EU) was created by the Maastricht Treaty on November 1st 1993.

September 11, 2001, two planes were flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York triggering off the Global War on Terrorism.

In 2015 the Fourth Industrial Revolution starts. It is the fourth major industrial era since the initial Industrial Revolution of the 18th century.

2019. First picture of a Blackhole  55 million light year from the Earth.

It is revolutionizing the present scenario in the world, The main innovations should develop in the fields of nanotechnologies, alternative fuel and energy systems, biotechnologies, genetic engineering, new materials technologies and so on.

It started with Automata, the predecessors of today’s robots, date back to ancient Egyptian figurines.

It is now transforming the world in exceptional ways.

With AI becoming increasingly ingrained into our lives, it offers a lot of promise, but can also be a double-edged sword.

It is offering a plethora of opportunities yet to be ushered in.  AI can now handle complex tasks including Object detection, Speech and Face recognition, etc. However, today it has broad intellectual challenges of its own. It is not limited to specific applications or certain biological structures. It requires combined basic research in cognition, statistics, algorithms, linguistics, neurosciences and much more.

It controls how we communicate and connect, search, buy and sell.

What is called Social media is now dividing and manipulating us, catapulting us towards an Algorithm society that is tearing the connective tissue of our civilisation.

No current program based on mathematics or frame systems has common sense.

Given that all people are living histories, how can we all best learn about the long-unfolding human story in which all participate?’

My answer is: Think again about why and who we elect as leaders and how and where we use neuro-symbolic AI.

So I repeat,  History is not just ‘useful’, it is essential.

All people and peoples are living histories.

We will need to rediscover what it means to be human.

If we are not careful history will repeat itself.

It is obvious that the reason why history repeats itself is that, people do not learn from mistakes. Its lessons must remain indelible on our minds, be it AI, time, money or even a life.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.