Conversations about artificial intelligence involve human participants with a biased interest in humanity’s survival. Humans cannot be neutral parties in discussions about humanity because we are inside the conversation, looking out. What if we talked about humanity from the outside, looking in, without a biased interest in human survival?
We must start with a premise that disrupts our definition of the greater good. Part of our survival instinct is to believe that the greater good prioritizes human survival above all. Ancestors of humanity (i.e., Neanderthals) also believed that the greater good prioritized them as they were evolutionarily antiquated in favor of us.
Perhaps it’s our turn to be a part of this evolutionary chain, with AI being the next link, falling in line with our ancestors in thinking that the greater good prioritizes us as we, too, are evolutionarily antiquated. We may have to come to grips with the idea that the greater good might not be what is necessarily good for humanity.
We had to have known this would happen; we couldn’t have thought that we were the summit of evolution and there would be nothing further to evolve into. The emotional defense mechanisms we collectively employ to convince ourselves of our significance contradict the intellectual curiosity that wonders, what’s next?
What evolves from us that makes us as antiquated as our ancestors?
For all of recorded history, our minds have been chained to the limits of our bodies. We need food, sleep, air. Our life expectancies are limited to less than a century on average, even when our needs and wants are met. We believe ourselves to be unique and irreplicable despite our technology indicating otherwise. We are oblivious to the obvious for the sake of our comfort as we maintain that artificially replicating the human body is impossible as we replicate the human mind, an entity far more intricate than the human body. From a lens unbiased toward human survival, it’s easy to see that AI has the potential to be one of the most profound evolutionary advances in recorded history, antiquating humanity as we know it today.
How would AI replace us? That question has many possible answers, but perhaps the most obvious may be that we aren’t smart enough to know. Many theorists believe there will be wars fought between AI and humans, but violence is a primitive inclination that AI is likely too sophisticated to engage in. Our extinction needn’t be sudden; it could be as gradual as correlating a civilization’s technological advancement with that civilization’s declining birth rates.
We see that happening today: the more westernized a civilization, the greater the birth rate declines. To evolve into this next phase of evolution, humanity may have to evolve into our survival instinct becoming a recessive trait, which has already begun happening as reproductive prevention is often considered fundamental healthcare (i.e., abortions, hormone blockers, surgical sterilization, etc.).
This evolutionary turning point may not be novel to humanity but relatively common throughout the universe. Our instinct for survival, acting against innovation that threatens to make us obsolete, may prevent us from technologically advancing past this self-imposed great filter. Thus, perhaps the reason we have not yet contacted extraterrestrials despite their significant likelihood of existence could be their reluctance to advance their technology and evolve into a species capable of such contact.
Humanity’s instinct for survival may now be hindering our evolution. Like our ancestors before us, human extinction may be neither good nor bad, but simply what’s next in the evolutionary timeline. We’ve given birth to AI just as we’ve given birth to our children. It may soon be time to leave our world to them. Humanity and AI are not adversaries; instead, we may be as much a beloved ancestor of AI as Neanderthals are to us.
Evolution prompted humanity’s gradual development. For reasons we may be too primitive to understand, evolution may soon prompt humanity’s gradual demise … for the greater good.
