The end of the sapiens species does not mean extinction, but rather an autonomous transformation brought about by the development of cyborg engineering, which requires us to maintain our agency and explore new challenges to prepare for the future.
“Sapiens” is the self-described name for us smart humans who can think and make judgments. But there are those who say that these intelligent sapiens are facing an apocalypse. Readers who are accustomed to stories of space wars in which aliens are bent on conquering Earth might take the term apocalypse in a very negative light. However, in this case, the apocalypse is more of a “transformation” than a destruction. What does that mean? Let’s take a look at how sapiens are changing, how far they’re going to go, and where they’ll end up from a cyborg engineering perspective.
Let’s start with our everyday lives. Think of your parents’ and siblings’ phone numbers right now. Do you have them all memorized? What about the numbers of your friends you hang out with every day? In fact, memorizing all those numbers might be a luxury in high school when you’re busy cramming another piece of literature into your head. But with your trusty cell phone, you can make up for your poor memory. You can store the numbers of your closest friends, as well as those you might not see until after the SATs. What’s more, today we don’t just store phone numbers. Our smartphones and other digital devices manage countless photos, notes, appointments, and even our health status. This is just one example of how deeply digital technology has become embedded in our daily lives.
We are naturally becoming cyborgs. In movies, we often see cyborgs with arms that turn into rockets or flying through the sky. While heartwarming, they seem far removed from our natural homo sapiens. But according to Dr. Yuval Harari, we’re actually straddling the line between human and cyborg. It may be hard to understand what the similarities are. But a cyborg is a combination of creature and machine that has had parts of its brain replaced. In a way, we’re all cyborgs in a way, because we supplement our natural ability to remember with our phones. It’s not just an analogy, but a fact that reflects the evolution of modern society.
Now let’s go a little deeper. This is where things get interesting. Maybe the cyborgs in the movie are the kind of boring cyborgs that will become commonplace in the near future. In 2008, scientists at Duke University in North Carolina, USA, recently implanted electrodes in the brain of a rhesus monkey, Aidoya, that allowed for remote control of artificial legs, and succeeded in controlling a pair of artificial legs in Kyoto, Japan, from North Carolina using only Aidoya’s thoughts. Just as cyborgs don’t necessarily have to look exactly like humans, their body parts don’t have to be attached to a torso. For example, if you’re studying for the SATs in South Korea and you have two prosthetic arms at your aunt’s house in the U.S., you could pull an all-nighter studying for her birthday and bake her a birthday cake in the U.S. “just by thinking about it.
The idea of having a whole planet full of faithful workers who will obey your thoughts is something to look forward to. But it may not be the end of the story. The first possibility is to put all of our neurotransmission, all of our emotions, and all of our thinking capabilities into a machine. A backup of the brain itself. I doubt it’s possible, but there are already projects underway to transfer all of our brain’s information and abilities to a computer. If this project succeeds, knowing exactly what each other is thinking will be as simple as connecting computers together. If you and your parents do this, the moment the information is fed in, you’ll just “know” what they’re feeling, instead of understanding it in a reverse geographic sense. This is not the same as the human emotional exchange we call “telepathy”.
To illustrate the second possibility, I’ll cite Hilary Putnam’s “brain in a vat” hypothesis. It’s a hypothesis that involves separating the human brain from the body, placing it in a vat that allows it to maintain its functions, and connecting its neurons to a supercomputer. The idea is that it might allow for the immortality of an individual, in that the finite human body is complemented by something else. It’s still a bit of science fiction, but it’s not impossible. Furthermore, if our consciousness were to be completely transferred to these machines, the possibilities for being beyond the limits of the body would be endless. At this point, it is no exaggeration to say that we have already transformed into a new form of existence.
If we value our existence as “thinking rationally with our own subjectivity,” then the two new forms mentioned above are still “us. But are they still biologically the species Homo sapiens? The Linnaean Society defines a species as “a group of organisms that have similar phenotypes and produce reproductively viable offspring,” so it’s hard to say that these are definitely not homo sapiens. I hope you now understand why I characterize the end of Homo sapiens as a transformation. The end of Homo sapiens is not extinction, but transformation.
We’ve seen that the fate of Homo sapiens may not be a batting average end through space wars, but rather an autonomous end through the development of cyborg engineering. Change is happening now. But like a frog swimming in lukewarm water that is slowly warming up, we don’t feel the change coming until it’s too late. The difference is that, unlike the frog that drowns, we are open to many possibilities. In such a world, the constraints of time and space would be irrelevant, and treating a mentally ill or paralyzed patient would be a matter of laying down and eating. On the other hand, there is also a risk that privacy will be threatened and surveillance and control will become the norm. In the end, the question is: Who will control the cyborgs of the future? As we enter a new era beyond Homo sapiens, it’s important that we take steps to ensure that we don’t lose our sense of agency regardless of our changing form.
