Humans need to care more for other living beings 
On one of the many animal-viewing safaris I used to go on with people dear to my heart, I still remember the moment when we came upon a large pride of lions and our safari guide gave us the names of every cub, their parents, and even their grandparents who were no longer around.
It seemed rather incongruous to me that humans would have given each of these animals a name, documenting their entire family tree and almost every aspect of their daily lives. The same thought comes to me when I stumble upon a National Geographic documentary detailing the most minute intricacies of the daily lives of insects.
Every animal on this earth is monitored down to the most intimate details of its daily life, the collection of food, territorial fights, or mating rituals. This is the same National Geographic that used to, in magazine form, offer us maps of as-yet uncharted areas of our planet or report major scientific discoveries.
My surprise is not at our minute study of every living thing on the planet but at our simultaneous inability to consider how our actions inevitably lead to their extinction.
We understand every detail of their daily lives, but we cannot trouble ourselves to change our own human behavior that is destroying these very species and their ecosystems. As a result, we have managed to give names to animals and their entire family trees while disregarding the fact that we are the ones almost ensuring those family trees will end soon.
The truth is that, apart from some legitimate useful scientific study, of course, decoding the secrets of living things has largely become a form of entertainment and a money-making enterprise. If only we put that knowledge to good use and act to protect the future of these living things. The same thing is happening to another species on our planet that we have tremendous knowledge about but are equally unable to use positively.
We humans are both victims and perpetrators. Humans, like every other animal and insect on the planet, are threatened with extinction, not in the long-term but in the coming generations.
The lords of technology and artificial intelligence are monitoring human beings in the same painful and intimate daily details, registering everything about us. Unfortunately, our mechanized computer chip society is equally unable to use the tremendous knowledge we possess of the species and ecosystems we are destroying to register how these actions also threaten us and risk our own demise.
Once the oceans are dead, the forests silent and our earth dry and unyielding, it will not be long before we also put an end to our own family trees. I believe the lords of technology and artificial intelligence are not only responsible for distracting us and making us think technology will save us, they drive our irresponsible and destructive behavior for economic interests.
We humans are both victims and perpetrators. Humans, like every other animal and insect on the planet, are threatened with extinction, not in the long-term but in the coming generations.
Like animals, we are monitored, given tags and corralled in what is left of the ecosystems that sustain us. The animals look at us in disbelief, incredulous at what we are doing to them and to ourselves. Their only wish is that instead of us giving human names to their progeny, we simply took the necessary measures to ensure that we could all share this generous planet for millennia to come.
• Hassan bin Youssef Yassin worked with Saudi petroleum ministers Abdullah Tariki and Ahmed Zaki Yamani from 1959 to 1967. He led the Saudi Information Office in Washington, D.C. from 1972 to 1981, and served with the Arab League observer delegation to the UN from 1981 to 1983.
