We tend to live as if we are the end-all of evolution. SciFi takes humans, mostly as we are, and projects us into the future. But what if we are not the end-all of evolution and that there are many evolutionary steps yet to be taken in this universe?
What might next steps entail?
Some thoughts on this:
1) How to address the Man/Woman vs Robot/AI conundrum? What if we evolve into Person+ AI, rather than Person vs AI? What if we become intertwined with our technology so that we are not separate from it and therefore it is no longer Us vs Them?
2) How do we overcome the vastness of space travel and the timespans needed to traverse even a few stars? What if we were not single humans and worked together to build a new much larger being that could live for thousands of our years?
What drove the single cell organisms to develop (evolutionarily) into multi-cellular organisms that lived way longer than any individual single-celled organism? Maybe we need to understand this evolutionary advantage? It could assist us in our quest to travel the universe and to live beyond the destruction of a single planet.
3) How to combine these two evolutionary directions into our next stage of being? The combination of people+AI (Paiple?) could assist in the integration of many individuals into a new being that lived much longer than any individual person and continued to remember what every person communicated.
Just as there exist many types of single-celled organisms that both assist in the symbionic workings of larger multi-cellular organisms and singled-celled organisms that work to destroy multi-celled organisms (e.g. bacteria), there is plenty of room for individuals as well as multi-paiple beings. Maybe disruptive AI-bots would be like viruses?
To conclude, there maybe directions for us humans to evolve into very new and different beings as we progress into the future, even if the evolution is not conducive to many social structures of today.
There is no reason for evolution to have reached its end with humans. The point is that we know so little - yes indeed - about how mutations emerge now and then, how they are selected naturally, and how they may transform the species they emerge in, that we can't - maybe we don't want to - wonder what kind of mutations will appear in us and what they will produce after being naturally selected. And there is no reason why this further evolution has to occur in us humans. They may occur in completely different species, such as pigs or chimpanzees. Or maybe a creature or species from another planet or universe. Our unnatural vanity makes us think we are the upmost species in the cosmos. Vanitas vanitatum, etc., and there are so many subspecies in the human species that these crucial mutations may occur in one subspecies that will then naturally eliminate us the way Homo Sapiens [us] did Neanderthals and Denisovans.
As long as humans, like all other living beings, reproduce differentially, there will be selection by the environment.
Once we blow up the earth - and its going to happen sooner or later I suspect, we won't have to worry about the possibilities.
On average, a species lives about 3 million years before becoming extinct or splitting into two distinct species. Well, if we, homo sapiens, after only three thousand years, are facing global problems that threaten our existence... well, perhaps cognitive intelligence has not been a fruitful adaptive path...
I think most responses are thinking as if evolution is only biological. My point is that we now have the means to evolve in non-biologic directions.
Two that I think are very important are:
1) The integration of technology with our own beings/bodies. William Gibson presents some sci-fi ways that primarily enhance individual capabilities, as does an exoskeleton. I am thinking more along the lines of integrating computers/AI with ourselves, such that we can recall just about any aspect held in a master database of information as well as we could communicate with others, especially in groups. Not messaging using a keyboard, but using a computer interface to our brains.
2) The second is evolution of our social structures, especially away from hierarchic structures and toward distributed and/or collaborative ones. Distributed structures allow for freedom of action depending upon the local situation, rather than depending upon communication up to a central decision maker and then return communication back down to the front lines. If everything our body has to handle all went through our brain, we would have died off long ago. In a similar vein, social structures should provide for distributed freedom of action as an evolutionary advantage. Collaborative structures provide advantages where many solutions are sifted through quickly and the best ones identified - as well as multiple actions taken simultaneously by many participants.
We may not evolve successfully if we do not take advantage of these evolutionary directions.
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