The patience and perseverance of the early hominins handed us the evolutionary gift of consciousness. We learned to pass down information from one generation to another. I am communicating ideas to you that are unfathomably complex for any other known life form to discern. I've perpetually wondered what animals, especially pets, think about. Living with humans, they watch us pursue increasingly luxurious lives and change the environment around us for the better. Yet, they show few to no signs of improving their quality of life.
We outclassed all other species on earth when our ancestors learned to make fire a couple of hundreds of thousands of years ago. Through a highly painstaking process spanning thousands of generations, we knew which plants to consume and which to avoid. It was only about twelve thousand years ago we began agriculturizing and establishing permanent settlements. At some point in the past, humans probably realized that they needed to pass down their knowledge and legacy, which they first did in an oral form, then in pictograms and proto-writing, and we came all the way to store and retrieve information in a digital medium. Our ability to communicate, pass down ideas, learn from history, plan our future, grow our own food, and shape our environment propelled us far ahead of other species. Today, we are collectively changing our world at a breakneck pace.
When we look back at history, we somehow think that all the inventions and discoveries thus far had to happen. You could read a million pages of history books, but nothing would truly capture what it was like to be alive all those years ago. This is because our brain constantly looks for patterns to compare with today's world. We don't know what it meant to not possess the knowledge we do today. The inability to forget or unlearn something is often touted as the curse of knowledge for humankind. I call this phenomenon the retro trap.
Sometimes, thinking about the cosmos helps put things in perspective. The earth is over four billion years old, but our lifespans are embarrassingly short compared to any of the natural processes occurring on our planet, like evolution, the formation of continents, etc. For most of humanity's history, there was no change in lifestyle between generations. However, it is almost impossible to imagine our lives without some or any of humanity's most significant findings. My parents didn't have a smartphone well into their middle ages, yet it is unthinkable for today's kids to live without one. We can only build upon whatever has been found or created until our time, which is why it is often said that we are a product of our times. We are bound by technology, political boundaries, religions, world views, and lifestyles of what exists today.
Our species is almost as human as our species was thousands of years ago. I use the phrase "almost as human" because of one significant advancement in the last couple of decades - a connected globe. With access to information anywhere and communicating in real-time, we seem to have left behind the epoch of homo sapiens and entered the age of homo digitalis. Today's humans cannot be separated from their personal devices, for they have become an extension of us, and our identities are defined by them. As Elon Musk rightly pointed out in 2016, we are already cyborgs.
Despite remarkable advancements in science and technology, we live in simpler times. Our creations will soon outsmart and overpower us. While we are caught up in our retro trap, it is essential to understand that our culture will evolve, political boundaries will change, and all existing religions will die. Our retro trap blinds our ability to understand the past as much as it does to prepare ourselves for what is to come. There is an urgent need to address some of the critical inefficiencies of our collective species. While machines can simply be cloned, it takes many years for humans to get to a productive state from birth. Communication between humans is still painfully slow compared to how fast machines can communicate with each other. It amazes me how quickly we've gotten here since modern computers were only invented over 70 years ago.
We soon need to evolve from homo digitalis into something more, perhaps what I would call homo bionicus. This is a case to move from natural selection to an artificial one where we control the evolution of our species. Computers are currently an extension of us, but they will need to become a part of us. In the near future, the line between humans and machines will blur to the extent that it would be virtually impossible to tell them apart. To avert this, we need to merge into one, using technology to address our inefficiencies. Some significant milestones we need to achieve are instant communication, immortality, and establishing colonies beyond our planet. We need to go beyond our inefficient physical bodies into something more meta. The debates of this time in the future would look much different as well, with some advocating equal rights as humans for machines. Eventually, we should reach a point where our species would achieve collective superconsciousness to try to answer even bigger questions like the nature of our existence.
