How are Humans Evolving in the Digital Age?

Someone says we Human Beings stopped evolving.
They see humans are stil the same, and modern devices avoid us to face the challenges that forced us to evolve in the ancient times.

Is it true?

I found these interesting articles and replied.

Here you find my thoughts about it.

Are humans still evolving? Yes we are!

You bet we are still evolving, but in a different way.
While animals adapt themselves to their environment, human beings adapt the environment.
So along the Ages human beings shifted from modeling themselves to the environment to modeling the environment to themselves.

If we think about evolution from a classic point of view, humans stopped to evolve.

It’s a biased point of view, as we are evolving in different levels: less physical, more cognitive.
And we are doing it by creating tools and making them closer and closer to our body and our Self, until we incorporate them.

It’s not new: we started thousands years ago.
Many people think that new devices are a jump of the evolution.
It isn’t: it’s a continuum that has an exponential acceleration, and is going to change our life.

Sightings from the future: the society that awaits us, with AIs and robots

The Web as we used to know it in the past years is disappearing and shifting to something new.
A futurist compared the development of the Web with the development of a human, and asserts four stages:

• childhood
• teenagehood
• adulthood
• old age

He asserts we started with the childhood, the age of the overabundance​ when everything is free and always at disposal.
A real Golden Age.

Then we shifted to the teenagehood ​when a human realizes that nothing is free, everything has a cost, and start to figure out how to gain convenience from the tool.
We are in the digital teenagehood according to this author: the Web is not free anymore, but we are not adults yet, so we still need someone else who guides us with the use of the tool.

I.e.: we still ask for someone who helps​ us to recover our Life and our Society, instead of taking action for ourselves.

As for the Economy, we are shifting from the Capitalism to something else we are spotting but we haven’t clear yet.

This is the real issue: the World is shifting faster and faster to the New Economy, yet we still live in a money-centric World.

So we have two Economies here: the oldest one fighting, striving and struggling to stay, the newest one fighting to get her place in the World.

I work in the Digital Education field, and in my speeches I always say to parents that we should not worry for our children, as they are born and live the new Reality, so they will find the way to go on.
I’m not scared for them: I’m worried for my generation that is in the transition age.

Full Overview of Sophia, the First Robot Citizen of Saudi Arabia

Sophia is just a photo, not the movie.
If I went back to the early days of our technology, I would see computers as big as a room just able to play chess or do some simple math.

We are at the same point when we talk about robotics and artificial intelligence.

When we see something like Sophia and laugh at how primitive she is, we are watching a photo of the moment.

If we open our mind and see the whole movie, we see that Humans have created something that has autonomy of movement and thinking.
Something that is able to take decisions without our help, to learn by themselves and find new creative solutions.
In this context, we are aware that we need new laws, as a robot is able to move and decide autonomously, and make mistakes, who or what do we have to blame?

Who or what should be sued by the law?

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality: Distinguishing Futuristic Media

Virtual reality and augmented reality have different features and serve different purposes.
Mixed reality is a natural consequence.

Virtual reality is about building a new reality, augmented reality is adding layers to the reality we are living.

As such, people are involved in different ways.

Virtual reality lacks the physical body that is replaced by cognition.
This is a reason why we talk about “embodied cognition”.
The user needs some clue about the environment, the objects and their materials.

Augmented reality is another matter.
It has the bonus of the solidity of the real World, yet it may appear confusing to the mind of the user.

Mixed reality is a step forward we are entering yet it’s a goal still far to achieve.
It means that you not only see different layers of the reality as in the augmented reality, but it means you see the real and the virtual World mixed together without distinction.

i.e.: seeing you and your last status of Facebook upon your head is augmented reality.
Seeing you as an angel with white wings is mixed reality.

We can go further: I’m walking along the street for real and I see you as an angel appearing in front of me, telling something to me and flying away, but actually you are in your office on the other side of the globe.

Mixed reality pushes us to another level of reality, that I call “the post-Truth reality”.

If you combine what I said above, living the post-Truth Age means the Truth is highly subjective.

i.e.: while I’m seeing you as an angel, my friend is seeing you as a snake at the same time.

Let’s go even further…
What happens when all of this is mixed with avatars of AIs, with social robots we perceive as human, etc…?
How can we spot what’s true and what’s fiction?

But the very question is: is such difference still important?