Jan 15, 2019, 11:27pm EST | 10,566 views 10,566 views
Forget Darwinian
Evolution. Humanity
May Soon Evolve Itself
Through A.I.
Michael Ashley Contributor
COGNITIVE WORLD Contributor Group
AI
A former Disney screenwriting consultant, Michael is a professor at
Chapman University. He has cowritten books on numerous subjects,
including Own the A.I. Revolution. He owns the content marketing
company Ink Wordsmiths and keynotes to business organizations on
the power of storytelling.
This article is more than 2 years old.
Does it seem like only
yesterday that you were
hearing about smart phones
for the first time? How about
preparing for Y2K? Before we
ever realized it, 2019 snuck
Are we poised to witness the
evolution of evolution itself?
up on us. And in less than a
DEPOSITPHOTOS ENHANCED BY
year, we will be entering a
COGWORLD
new decade. Before time
passes us by again, let’s assess how far we have come as
individuals — and as a species. It may feel like humans
have always lived in relative peace aided by improving
technology, especially if you're a millennial who grew up
with the web in your pocket, but the so-called modern era
is a recent phenomenon.
According to experts, life on Earth began 3.8 billion years
ago. It took millions more for these organisms to evolve
into our ape antecedents. So-called modern humans only
arrived on the scene approximately 200,000 years ago, a
veritable blink of an eye measured against vast eons.
Agriculture caught on 12,000 years ago, long before the
Sumerians invented writing — longer before the Romans
developed a vast network of roads — longer still before
the advent of electricity, the combustion engine, and the
internet.
In his recent Netflix special Strange Times comic Joe
Rogan humorously contextualizes just how recently
modern times began. “The United States was founded in
1776. People live to be a hundred. That’s three people
ago… Three people ago, slave owners made boats out of
trees and used the power of the wind to drift across the
ocean. They didn’t have a YouTube video to watch first.
They didn’t talk to a travel agent. You know what they
had? A drawing. Some guy went there and drew it… They
took their baby and jumped on a boat and floated across
the f***ing ocean with their kids. Animals. That’s us. It
just happened. Real recent!”
In fact, the very idea that evolution exists — a scientific
theory describing the emergence and corporal
transformation of creatures responding to environmental
stresses over time — is also damn recent. Charles Darwin
wrote On the Origin of Species, the definitive book on the
subject in 1859. (That’s less than two people ago
according to Rogan’s logic.) Now, at the beginning of 2019
might we be witnessing the evolution of evolution itself?
“Evolution has been the norm on this planet: from the
simplest prokaryotes to today, a human being with 30
trillion cells and a certain level of cognitive ability,” New
York Times bestselling author and founder/chairman of
XPRIZE Foundation Peter Diamandis told my
coauthor Neil Sahota and I during an interview for our
upcoming book, Uber Yourself Before You Get Kodaked:
A Modern Primer on A.I. for the Modern Business.
Diamandis, an expert at the forefront of technology,
believes we are witnessing the evolution of intelligence.
“We are going from Darwinism evolution by natural
selection to evolution by human direction.”
Recent technological breakthroughs support Diamandis’s
assertion. One only need look to the staggering
achievements of the gene-editing technology CRISPR
(Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic
Repeats) to observe people tinkering with the limits of
biology. Within the past decade, scientists have
discovered how to edit genes. “We’re talking about a
powerful new tool to control which genes get expressed in
plants, animals, and even humans; the ability to delete
undesirable traits and, potentially, add desirable traits
with more precision than ever before,” writes Brad
Plumer et al. for Vox .
CRISPR made international headlines last November
when Chinese scientist Dr. He Jiankui announced he was
the first person to create a genetically modified baby.
Using CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology, he
transformed a gene relating to immune function to
produce twin girls resistant to HIV. (Reportedly, their
father is HIV positive.) Though the U.S. currently bans
gene-editing and a slew of scientists have denounced
Jiankui on ethical grounds, proponents of the technology
marvel at its promise to one day eradicate disease
altogether, as well as to custom design our progeny’s
attributes as precisely as we select avatar characteristics
in video games.
Artificial intelligence, explains Diamandis, is opening the
door for the types of genetic engineering breakthroughs
that ultimately will allow us to evolve our offspring in
unprecedented ways. “In the past, breeding has been a
relatively random or selective process, a very gross
process — but using large-scale machine learning on
biological data sets we will be able to better understand
how genotypes map onto phenotypes. Now putting aside
moral and ethical issues, it’s not a matter of if it’s going to
happen, but when. We are shortly going to be in a
position to understand what the exact genes are for
increasing a person’s muscular physiology or cognitive
intellect and then editing to achieve what’s desired.”
As the preeminent terrestrial species who learned to
improve our status through higher-order thinking, our
evolution won’t be limited to physical advancement,
however. Diamandis predicts imaginative human
creativity, coupled with technological innovation, will
even evolve the way we think and relate to each other.
How might this occur? Beyond evolving ourselves, we will
upgrade our environment to suit our needs. “Our world is
going to become what I call auto-magical,” says
Diamandis. “Automated and magical. It will respond to
our desires and inner thoughts.”
We can glimpse a representation of what Diamandis
suggests in popular entertainment, such as Ironman Tony
Stark’s artificially intelligent computer, J.A.R.V.I.S. (Just
A Rather Very Intelligent System). Programmed to speak
in a gentlemanly British accent, J.A.R.V.I.S. acts as a kind
of 24-7 personal assistant and domestic manager to Stark.
“We’re all going to have a version of J.A.R.V.I.S., powered
by A.I.,” says Diamandis. The J.A.R.V.I.S. that Diamandis
portends can be likened to an individually personalized
A.I. software. “We may wear it, it may be just moving as a
cloud near us, but effectively, it’ll be a version of
J.A.R.V.I.S. that knows us better than we know ourselves
and will exist as our interface. This AI software will help
us process information and interact with the world at a
much higher broad rate than we do today and in a much
more holistic fashion.”
Becoming more comfortable with an AI assistant like
J.A.R.V.I.S. (or whatever we choose to call it) is just one
more step toward what Diamandis also believes is
inevitable — and tremendously beneficial — for our
species: the merging of our minds via technology. He
envisions a future in which humans are interconnected at
a cognitive level; a kinder, gentler version of Star Trek’s
the Borg or perhaps the telepathic confluence of minds
Olaf Stapledon describes in his novel, Star Maker. “I
think we are going to begin to merge human
consciousness as we connect our neocortices to the
cloud,” explains Diamandis.
Returning to popular culture as analogy, Star Trek offers
an instructive ideal as to what is possible for evolved
societal relations. Set several hundred years in the future,
Gene Roddenberry’s vision contemplated a future devoid
of tribalism or even planetary jingoism. His protagonists,
The Federation, work in harmony, valuing all life in the
known universe.
Achieving a similar type of unitary consciousness enters
the realm of possibility, suggests Diamandis, when we can
cognitively merge — and when we cease viewing life as a
zero-sum game. “A more intelligent species is a more
peaceful species,” he says. “When we're living in this
closer interdependence, what I call a meta-intelligence, an
individual’s success in China or Russia or Lithuania is my
success. The better someone else does, the better I will do
as well.”
In the spirit of such species-wide comradery, it is fitting to
return to the subject of the new year and what it heralds.
Creating resolutions is a favorite tradition during this
time, as we imagine how we might improve in days to
come — how we might evolve beyond our wildest
ambitions. It would do us well at the start of 2019 to
consider one last thought from Diamandis.
“As children we dream of what we want to become. Maybe
we dream of being a sports star, a writer, a scientist — but
then we get smacked with the reality of life. Maybe we’re
not smart enough. Maybe our family doesn’t live in the
right area to gain access to the right school. You run into
reality limits to your dreams. But I believe that as AI
becomes a true partner with humans, it will allow us to
obtain what we dream far more reliably and far more
easily. AI will enable us to participate in the dream of our
lives.”
Michael Ashley
A former Disney story consultant, Michael is a screenwriting
professor at Chapman University. He has written over twenty
books on numerous subjects, including four… Read More
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