In the year 2024, Homo sapiens, physically weak but dominating the planet with intelligence and technology, has overcome natural selection through intelligent design, including biotechnology and cyborg engineering. However, there is also the possibility that these technologies could lead to our extinction, which raises philosophical and ethical questions. How will humanity respond to these challenges in the future?
In 2024, we are arguably the most dominant species on Earth. However, our current species, biologically categorized as Homo sapiens, is physically far behind other mammals. We don’t have the sharp claws and molars that they have, and we don’t have the size and muscle mass that they have. Even a medium-sized dog would be very difficult for a human to defeat with bare hands. From an evolutionary point of view, the laws of natural selection should put such a human in a very difficult position to survive on Earth. However, Homo sapiens not only dominates the planet today, but is on its way to becoming an even more evolved species through cyborg engineering. How did we come to dominate the planet?
Professor Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens provides the answer. In his book, Harari credits Homo sapiens as the first species to break the law of natural selection and replace it with the law of intelligent design. According to Harari, in the billions of years of life, no species before Homo sapiens chose intelligent design because they didn’t have the intelligence to design something else. Neanderthals, a species that competed with Homo sapiens, only had a naturally selected way of hunting birds. However, Sapiens realized that they could create new lineages out of necessity that didn’t exist in nature, and this was an example of intelligent design by humans, not God, creating new beings.
There is also a view that the Neanderthals became extinct because they lost the battle of intelligent design to Homo sapiens, but also because they evolved to build larger physiques and muscles, which is more favorable for hunting and poaching than Homo sapiens, and that this led to greater energy expenditure, which led to their eventual extinction during the Ice Age. Homo sapiens won both of these competitions and eventually became the dominant species.
This four-billion-year-old system of natural selection is now facing an entirely different kind of challenge: intelligent design. There are three main methods of intelligent design: biotechnology, cyborg engineering, and non-organic engineering. As I explained earlier, I’m going to focus on cyborg engineering. In Homo sapiens, a cyborg is a partial combination of living and non-living things. For example, a person with a bionic hand. Sapiens recognizes that the true potential of future technologies lies in transforming Homo sapiens itself. But at the same time, it warns that such cyborg engineering will give us inorganic attributes that cannot be removed from our bodies and that will change our abilities, desires, personality, and identity.
If we were to create a cyborg based on Homo sapiens, and that cyborg did not reproduce, was genderless, could share thoughts directly with other beings, and had a capacity for concentration and memory thousands of times that of humans, would we still call it Homo sapiens? What would become of us if such beings were created? This is a realm of speculation that no one can predict, because just as we defined the singularity as the point at which all currently known laws of nature prior to the Big Bang ceased to exist, so too would the new post-singularity concept destroy all laws of nature as we know them. However, if the cyborgs created become something completely different from Homo sapiens, and if their existence leads to the extinction of Homo sapiens, then Homo sapiens will have been exterminated by intelligent design, which is how it evolved.
In Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, humanity manages the birth and death of its own species, and the whole process exists on a designed rail. The new species is incapable of intense emotions and can only move within the confines of management and control. We wouldn’t call this humanity Homo sapiens. In this novel, Homo sapiens as we know it is represented as a savage primitive tribe. They have been culled in competition with the new species.
Through intelligent design, Homo sapiens overcame the laws of natural selection and competition from Neanderthals to become the dominant species on Earth. However, just as the Neanderthals tried to evolve to their own advantage in the laws of natural selection and were wiped out by changes in their environment, the same intelligent design that has helped Homo sapiens overcome the laws of natural selection and become the rulers of the planet may become a double-edged sword that will bring about the end of Homo sapiens as a species due to the existence of cyborgs. Just like in Brave New World, we may lose the race to a new species, a new humanity. Homo sapiens may become the rulers of the planet through the laws of intelligent design, but it may also become extinct through the cyborgs it creates.
Advances in science and technology could drastically change the future of Homo sapiens. Currently, artificial intelligence and robotics are rapidly changing our lives, and it’s not just in our daily lives. These technologies are also opening up new possibilities in the fields of education, healthcare, and the military. In healthcare, for example, AI is enabling more accurate diagnoses and personalized treatments. In the military, autonomous weapon systems are changing the face of warfare. These changes are fundamentally reshaping the world as we know it, and they will have a profound impact on the way Homo sapiens exist.
While our intelligence and technology have allowed us to dominate the planet, it’s time to consider the possibility that these technologies could also dominate us in reverse. The moment AI surpasses human intelligence, we will need to find ways to coexist with them. This is not just a technical issue, but a philosophical and ethical one. It will raise new questions about who we are and why we exist, and we need to find answers.
Humanity has always faced new challenges, and has grown by overcoming them. But this challenge is unlike any other. Along with technological advances, we will have to think deeply about the nature of humanity, and in doing so, create a better future. Whether Homo sapiens can remain the rulers of the planet or give way to something new is in the hands of all of us.
