Multi-tasking, evolution and challenging God

7 min readMar 12, 2024

The Ideas for Writers Series #2

A short history of multi-tasking

Homo sapiens’ brain processes one primary thing at a time.

We can jump back and forth in micro-seconds so we keep multiple tasks moving, gaining a marginal increase in output, at a cost to creativity (so this works best for familiar tasks) and with greater stress, but really complex problems require focus.

In one context –our autonomic nervous system — we can simultaneously receive, interpret and act on multiple streams of information, but this is mostly outside our immediate consciousness. We could focus on our breathing, but we don’t have to. Without training, we aren’t even aware of our regulation of things like blood pressure, digestion, circadian rhythm, hormone release. These and other essential functions are regulated within the hypothalamus, a tiny part of the brain that reaches beyond physiological functions to influence emotions, stress, violence (fight or flight) and sexual arousal. It probably plays a bigger role in what others perceive as our personality than does the other 99% of our brain. If ever there is a zombie apocalypse, this is the part of the brain that will be doing the driving. And it’s a true multi-tasker.

Computers have evolved to true multi-tasking (if we define a computer as a box, because it could be argued that multi-tasking computers contains multiple processors each doing one task, or time sharing like a human brain).

Considering our already existing pseudo or low level multi-tasking, genuine multi-tasking in the hypothalamus and the conceptual similarities with computers, it seems entirely possible a future species of Homo or even a new genus could develop true, conscious and complex multi-tasking capabilities, with dramatically improved performance potentials.

Of course, this new evolution won’t be us. Based on how we dealt with other species of human, it might even be our exterminator.

Fear and control of superior evolution

The next top of the food chain might be synthetic. The fear that artificial intelligence is currently stirring is at core our fear of being replaced by the next stage of evolution, whatever type of life form it is.

In our age, if we want to explore the deepest parts of the human psyche we can engage with psychiatrists or, more entertainingly, we can look to popular literature and films. There it’s clear that we fear the arrival of new types of being and expect a war to the death with them. At a primordial level, we understand that’s how survival of the fittest works.

An interesting question then is, could a species evolve that is able to over-rule the principles of evolution and say, No, we are going to cooperate for mutual benefit? Or even to take control of evolution? Actually, this species already exists. We are it. We have the intellectual capacity, we have developed most of the technology, we have the means to control our evolution.

But we do not have the will. We are lazy. We can think, but we prefer hamburgers. We get by pretending it will never happen to us. We submerge our awareness in daily concerns and personal comfort. We have given the steering wheel of technology to money and possibility. We’re hardly even putting in the effort to run our own local societies.

We need a leader who can shake us out of this self-absorption and lethargy, but we won’t listen until the threat of being superseded Homo sapiens is undeniably upon us. Then, like the movies, we’ll need to reach deep to find the something that ultimately lets us triumph over the new. Or more likely, in the story of evolution, played out a million times more than there are movies, the next evolution will be the next evolution. Whether it’s Homo next, AI or a microbe.

We could be our own next evolution, but we won’t.

Controlling evolution and our greatest scifi story

The greatest big-screen scifi story of our time, Star Wars, can be read as the ambition to regulate “survival of the fittest” to allow simultaneous multiple strands of evolution, not all of them well suited to wars or even self-defence, but all having and adding value. The enemy in this story is the desire to subjugate. The surprise redemption is weak-bodied humans with their easy befriending of difference, love of stupid-level risks and unwavering commitment to what is right. Flattering your audience is an always reliable writers’ trick, and who’s to stand up in a theatre and point out that our reality is two-thirds otherwise.

What would superior beings do with their time?

Waiting for our end, a writer might speculate as to what an entire population of multi-taskers might do with their time. Work problems, couple of minutes. Sorting out your personal life, based on current ratios of time spent, a few seconds. Learning all of history and every culture and language, yawn. OK, they could do science, that might take a while but it would also compound the problem by increasing already excess capabilities.

How about an end to war and poverty, problems old species of humans have failed at? Good goal, but not relevant after a new species has taken over. Presumably they will be smart enough to end war, or they will prove that war is essential and desirable in occupying huge multi-tasking capabilities in a purposive way.

What about discovering and building value in some mystical, spiritual, humanistic ultimate-meaning sense? A pretty big task that a coldly logical or synthetic processing capability might laugh out of existence. In films, that will be their weak point that lets sapiens win.

Evolution does not respond to quality or value, only survival

More likely in reality, better adapted species will win despite them having lower spiritual/cultural/human value. Over three centuries Classical/Hellenist Greeks first thought 80% of all original thoughts in human history, invented most sciences, developed the philosophical base western societies are built on and created democracy. By contrast, over a thousand year of domination the Romans gave us crucifixion, a dodgy numbering system and some engineering marvels. What the left behind was so little, Europe slid immediately into five hundred years of the Dark Ages. That’s survival of the best adapted to survival, not survival of the best.

Evolution is about adaptation to a specific environment, it does not select on spiritual, scientific or social values that do not contributing to survival against competitors, it does not even favour complexity except as it relates to survival in a specific local environment. The successor to sapiens could easily be a microbe. An archaea[i], perhaps an extremophile[ii]. Or an eubacteria[iii], a domain[iv] whose evolution already includes E. coli, Staphylococcus, Salmonella and Lactobacillus bacteria. Strangely, virus[v] like COVID are only a weak contender.

The energy to multi-task and be superior

Another interesting speculation, prompted by computers, is energy consumption. A multi-tasking AI quantum computer uses a great deal of energy. Far beyond the capacity of a human body to generate.

So how will future multi-tasking organisms meet this need? Will they need to eat ten, a hundred times as much? Will they be machines with inbuilt mini nuclear reactors?

Relative to current human energy needs, we have radioactive source materials with the potential if fully released to power us for a hundred million years, but a new energy-hungry multi-processor organism could change that. Additionally, to travel between solar systems even at speeds approaching light will require massive energy, far beyond our current ability to even imagine how it might be stored and applied.

New species could start stealing stars not being used by species strong enough to defend themselves (like us). Shift a bit of dark matter, focus a massive gravitational pull, drag a star in your direction and release it in an energy stripping work area. Speed a few billion years of burn into a rapid supernova and suck out the energy.

The universe might be infinite, but the time taken to travel reduces its accessible size to finite proportions. Galactic locales that could be stripped of stars, forcing responsible governments to try to enforce sustainable star stripping, to protect the galactic environment. Creating criminal star stripping gangs and offering rebels a funding source. Now there’s a plot with a strong credibility link to the present: star-change deniers who argue that there will always be more stars to strip, just a bit further out.

Beings that could threaten the survival of the entire universe. If God came to defend his creation, maybe wage war on Him. The Devil did that, with a reasonable degree of success. Maybe we can’t really multi-task, but waging war on God is something sapiens may have a talent for.

Footnotes

[i] Archaea are a group of micro-organisms that are similar to, but evolutionarily distinct from bacteria. Reference https://microbiologysociety.org/why-microbiology-matters/what-is-microbiology/archaea.html#:~:text=Archaea%20are%20a%20group%20of,of%20organisms%20are%20called%20extremophiles accessed 24 January 2024

[ii] Many archaea have been found living in extreme environments, for example at high pressures, salt concentrations or temperatures. These types of organisms are called extremophiles. Reference https://microbiologysociety.org/why-microbiology-matters/what-is-microbiology/archaea.html#:~:text=Archaea%20are%20a%20group%20of,of%20organisms%20are%20called%20extremophiles accessed 24 January 2024

[iii] Eubacteria are prokaryotic organisms (i.e. lacking a membrane-bound nucleus), predominantly unicellular, and with DNA in a single circular chromosome. Reference https://www.biologyonline.com/dictionary/eubacteria#:~:text=Eubacteria%20are%20prokaryotic%20organisms%20(i.e.,Synonym%3A(true)%20bacteria accessed 24 January 2024.

[iv] Generally it’s accepted that there are three domains into which all life forms fall: Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya (which is us and all other animals, plants, fungi and some single-cell organisms). Although it’s much debated, viruses are not included in any domain as they are not considered to be alive ,even though they contain DNA (or at least RNA), can evolve and can have parasitic or co-dependent relationships with living organisms. However, viruses are inert outside hosts, cannot generate energy and cannot reproduce outside hosts. They are simply packets of genetic material. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK8174/#:~:text=Viruses%20are%20small%20obligate%20intracellular,evolution%20of%20virus%20and%20host. And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_(biology) both accessed 24 January 2024.

[v] Viruses are generally not considered to be alive in part because they cannot be active outside a host. A parasitic virus could not make it to the top of the heap even if evolved an ability to infect every living thing, as it would stop being active concurrent with the death of the last living thing. It would then be inert, a potential for some finite period of time perhaps, but no more than a piece of code that needs an organism to run in. We might consider a running computer to be somehow “alive” — but not a floppy disk.