Homo Sapiens — Moving Towards Singularity
The Gods Must Be Crazy
Sapiens is a fascinating and controversial book that opens our mind to some incredible possibilities about our (Human) evolution over the span of last 6 million years. Homo Sapiens have made tremendous progress , especially in the last 12000 years, says the author Harrari.
Natural selection may have provided Homo sapiens with a much larger playing field than it has given to any other organism, but the field has still had its boundaries. The implication has been that, no matter what their efforts and achievements, Sapiens are incapable of breaking free of their biologically determined limits.
This is no longer true: Homo sapiens is transcending those limits. Homosapiens are now beginning to break the laws of natural selection, replacing them with the laws of intelligent design.
Laws of intelligent design
For close to 4 billion years, every single organism on the planet evolved subject to natural selection. The giraffe, for example, got its long neck thanks to competition between archaic giraffes rather than to the whims of a super-intelligent being.
The first crack in the old regime appeared about 10,000 years ago, during the Agricultural Revolution. Sapiens who dreamt of fat, slow-moving chickens discovered that if they mated the fattest hen with the slowest cock, some of their offspring would be both fat and slow. Further inter mating of those offspring with each other, will lead to a line of fat, slow birds. It was a race of chicken unknown to nature, produced by the intelligent design not of a God but of a human.
The future replacement of natural selection by intelligent design could happen in any of three ways: through biological engineering, cyborg engineering (cyborgs are beings that combine organic with non-organic parts) or the engineering of inorganic life.
BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING
Biological engineering is deliberate human intervention on the biological level (e.g. implanting a gene) aimed at modifying an organism’s shape, capabilities, needs or desires and diseases.
Remarkable wonders can be performed with genetic engineering, which is why it raises a host of ethical, political and ideological issues. And it’s not just pious monotheists who object that man should not usurp God’s role. Many confirmed atheists are no less shocked by the idea that scientists are stepping into nature’s shoes.
BIONIC ENGINEERING
There is another new technology which could change the laws of life: cyborg engineering. Cyborgs are beings which combine organic and inorganic parts, such as a human with bionic hands. In a sense, nearly all of us are bionic these days, since our natural senses and functions are supplemented by devices such as eyeglasses, pace-makers, orthotics, and even computers and mobile phones (which relieve our brains of some of their data storage and processing burdens). We stand poised on the brink of becoming true cyborgs, of having inorganic features that are inseparable from our bodies, features that modify our abilities, desires, personalities and identities.
March 2024 saw Neuralink, a company focused on brain-computer interface technology, showcasing its first human paralysed patient using a brain-chip implant to play Chess with his mind.
ENGINEERING IN-ORGANIC LIFE
The third way to change the laws of life is to engineer completely inorganic beings. The most obvious examples are computer programs and computer viruses that can undergo independent evolution.
Many programmers dream of creating a program that could learn and evolve completely independently of its creator. In this case, the programmer would be a first mover, but his creation would be free to evolve in directions neither its maker nor any other human could ever have envisaged.
The Human Brain Project, founded in 2005, hopes to recreate a complete human brain inside a computer, with electronic circuits in the computer emulating neural networks in the brain. In 2013 the project received a grant of EI billion from the European Union. Currently, the website says “The Human Brain Project was a European Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagship project that ran from 2013 to 2023. It pioneered a new paradigm in brain research, at the interface of computing and technology.”
The development of AI Chatbots — like Bard, ChatGPT are moving at an unknown speed that is worrying and making Industry leaders and Governments to develop security protocols. London hosted a 2 day AI Safety Summit on 1,2 November 2023. The Declaration at the summit by 28 countries notes “potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these AI models”.
The Singularity
Presently, only a tiny fraction of these new opportunities have been realised. The race is accelerating and what world can be in the next 25 years is anyone’s guess.
Physicists define the Big Bang as a singularity. It is a point at which all the known laws of nature did not exist. Time too did not exist. It is thus meaningless to say that anything existed “before” the Big Bang. We may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world — me, you, men, women, love and hate — will become irrelevant. Anything happening beyond that point is meaningless to us.
The Animal that Became a God
Seventy thousand years ago, Homo Sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a God, poised to acquire the divine abilities of creation and destruction.
Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.
Nobody knows where we are going.
We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. We are accountable to no one. We are seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction.
Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible Gods who don’t know what they want?
Are we fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world — me, you, men, women, love and hate — will become irrelevant.
This is Part 4 of a 4 Part series on the book “Sapiens” , where I highlight some broad contours of the book. I invite you to take a look at this book. I am quite sure that it will give you valuable insight and perspective into understanding our evolution.
Part 1 –
Part 2 –
Part 3 –
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