The foundation of what I believe about things is: 

Humans are dumb.  Humans are stupid.  Humans are ignorant.  Humans don't know very much.

I'm not saying, "Some people are stupid," or "A lot of people are stupid," or even "Everyone except for me is stupid" - I'm very much including myself.  I'm very dumb.  I don't know very much at all.  I'm not looking down on anyone when I say that humans are dumb.  On the contrary, I see myself as super-dumb.

Of course, it's a matter of degree.  Some people are stupider than others.  But everyone is stupid.  Even the smartest, most intelligent, most knowledgeable - the greatest geniuses that ever lived - are vastly ignorant.

You might ask: compared to what?

Good question.

Humans are the smartest, most knowledgeable things in the universe that we know about.  But that just goes to show that we don't know very much.

As far as we know, we're the only things out there.

Even if it turns out to be true that we are the only intelligent form of life in the entire universe, even then, I would still maintain that we are pretty ignorant.  We have a tiny amount of knowledge and intelligence, compared with all of the knowledge and intelligence possible.

"What you don't know could fill a book" - no, what you don't know could fill the universe.

Someone might reply: sure, we don't know that much right now, but we're still learning!  And the potential for the human mind is infinite!  But... is it?  I suspect that it is, in fact, finite.  It may have even already been reached.  Maybe, sometimes, when we learn something, we also forget something we once knew.

And even if it turns out that there are other intelligences out there, even if they are trillions, quadrillions of times more knowledgeable than us, doesn't that mean that they, too, have a finite intelligence, finite knowledge?  ...Which, compared with infinite knowledge, is roughly zero.  Likewise, if an AI becomes massively more advanced than us humans, it will still be finite in its understanding, and thus will know next-to-nothing.  Even if there isn't an infinite amount of knowledge that is possible to be known, it's still so vast compared to what we do know, or could know, that what we know is next-to-nothing. 

Some people in "modern," "western" societies think of people like uncontacted Awa people in the Amazon rainforest as "savage," "primitive," etc..  I'm trying to remember where it was I read it - I think it may have been in a book by David Deutsch or Stephen Hawking, but maybe it was Ray Kurzweil - in which the author condescendingly mentioned that these people in the Amazon rainforest "do not even realize that they are in Brazil."

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