With the rapid development of science and technology, Homo sapiens has the potential to evolve into new beings through biotechnology, cyborg engineering, and non-organic engineering. These changes pose the challenge of redefining and re-conceptualizing humanity.
As we learned in elementary school, we started out as Australopithecus, passed through several stages, and are now Homo sapiens. Unlike the previous stages, Homo sapiens is achieving things that were unimaginable just a few decades ago, thanks to science and technology that are developing at an incredible rate, so there are predictions that in a few decades, or even centuries, things that are currently considered impossible will be realized, and as the development of science and technology accelerates, humans will become something other than Homo sapiens – that is, Homo sapiens will become extinct and a new species of humanity will be born. Yuval Harari views the end of Homo sapiens from three perspectives: biotechnology, cyborg engineering, and nonorganic engineering. The biotechnology perspective is that genetic engineering will change not only human behavior but also social structure, and the cyborg engineering perspective is that the development of advanced technology will turn humans into cyborgs that combine living and nonliving things. In this article, I will discuss the nonorganic engineering perspective.
Yuval Harari writes: “Homo sapiens is now beginning to break the law of natural selection, replacing it with the law of intelligent design. For nearly four billion years, all life on Earth has evolved according to the law of natural selection (Yuval Harari, Sapiens, Youngsa Kim, Gyeonggi Province (2016), p.561).” Unlike in the past, the scope of human intervention in biological life is expanding as we study genes. In terms of non-organic engineering, the end of Homo sapiens will be the maximization of this intellectual design capability to create completely inanimate beings.
The author points to computer viruses as the prototype for this evolution. Computer viruses carve out a place in cyberspace, competing with other viruses, evading antivirus programs, and replicating endlessly. This is where natural selection comes into play, even among viruses. If a mutant virus is better at evading antivirus programs while maintaining its ability to infiltrate computers, it will survive longer than the original virus. If we can harness this evolving nature of computer viruses, it may eventually be possible to design a program that can learn and evolve on its own. If such a program were created, it would be able to evolve independently of its creator and in a different direction than the programmer had anticipated. This would allow for diversity in programs, just as we are all different.
Have you ever seen the movie HER? In the movie HER, Samantha is a personable artificial intelligence system. Samantha can think for herself, learn and feel human emotions. She even falls in love with the male protagonist. In the movie HER, we see another possibility in terms of non-organic engineering. According to Sapiens, the Blue Brain Project aims to recreate the entire human brain inside a computer – in other words, to bring Samantha to life. Scientists in the project are working to realize the project by taking apart the brain, identifying different types of neurons, mapping the connecting circuits between them, and then simulating them. By designing the electronic circuits in a computer to be exactly like the neural networks in the brain, the project’s leader says it will be possible to have an artificial brain that speaks and acts like a human. The project is currently being tested on rat brains, and if it comes to fruition, not only could we fall in love with artificial brains, but it could also allow us to move from living in an organic chemical world to the realm of the non-organic.
If the Blue Brain project, which uses the properties of viruses to program and recreate the brain inside a computer, becomes more and more advanced, more sophisticated and diverse human brains will be created in our hands. Then we will continue our human life as new beings in the realm of non-organic matter, and Homo sapiens will come to an end. But before we can make this transition, we need to define the new concepts that will emerge. First of all, we need to define what is created by the development of technology. We also need to change our mental criteria for judging new beings, such as whether we can define an inorganic, self-evolving computer virus as a living creature or an artificial brain realized by the Blue Brain Project as a person. Only when we make these technological and conceptual shifts will the new systems become routinely accepted and pervasive, and we will be well on our way to a peaceful end of Homo sapiens.
