The Great Upgrade: The Iterative Arc of Human Evolution
From Biological Evolution to Technological Revolution
Who We Are
I want to give a zoomed-out overview of what we know about ourselves as a tribe of primates on Earth. It’s an important perspective to internalize because it underpins many life principles I’d like to share in future letters.
So far, the best book I’ve read on this is Sapiens by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari.
Approximately 6 million years ago, our earliest known ancestor began to transition from ape-like locomotion to walking on two legs. Between then and the emergence of homo sapiens 5 million years later, many different human species lived and died in Africa.
Over time, climate-driven changes to the African landscape eventually forced the intermingling of these previously culturally and geographically isolated human species, giving rise to modern-day homo sapiens.
Genetic research has allowed us to plot the migration, movement, and evolution of humans. Before that, the best we could do was examine bones found in the ground.
The skull on the left is our 2.5 million-year-old ancestor, Australopithecus africanus. The skull on the right is 4,800 years old but is nearly identical to modern humans. It's you and me!
You can also see how over many evolutionary iterations, the shape of the skulls changed for various adaptations. The most significant change is the size of the frontal bone, or forehead, which enlarged to accommodate an expanding neocortex.
Eventually, Homo sapiens outcompeted other human species and became the alpha predator on planet Earth.
There are a few significant historical revolutions in the history of our species that are worth mentioning.
The cognitive revolution occurred slowly between 70,000 and 13,000 years ago. Humans developed the ability to imagine. As far as we can tell, no other animal does this. This is radically advantageous because if you can reflect on your past to forecast the future, you essentially have a mental simulator for your environment. It's like an imaginary lab to test ideas. It's also an abstract form of mental time travel into the past and future.
Being able to remember and examine the past made us better at surviving in the present. We learned to cooperate, build trust amongst groups of humans rather than competing for resources, and eventually developed complex social skills (gossip theory) that rivaled other humanoid species.
The agricultural revolution occurred approximately 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. While the process took thousands of years to refine, humans had stumbled upon the infinite food hack by learning how to cultivate crops for consumption.
Since all our free time was no longer devoted to scavenging for food, tribes of humans could start to specialize in other things that increased the tribe's productivity as a whole. The sum was greater than the parts instead of the zero-sum game it had been previously.
From this specialization comes the really important life principle of comparative advantage.
A modern parallel is how with nuclear power we have figured out the infinite energy hack, though this still needs to be refined.
When you observe how human infants crawl around and put everything they pick up in their mouth, you are observing the deep scavenger programming we to this day carry in our genetics.
The scientific revolution is very recent. It occurred only 500 years ago in Europe during the Renaissance.
Before the scientific revolution, humans could only speculate about the mechanics of the world based on observation. Our interpretation of these observations was significantly distorted by cognitive biases and blind spots in our understanding. ("We can see if she’s a witch by whether she floats or sinks!")
The scientific method allowed us to experimentally test those observations. Finally, we could refine our understanding for accuracy and eventually uncover laws of nature. From this, the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, and many others came about.
By repeating this discovery process, humans continued to advance technological development, leading to increased productivity and prosperity. As a testament to the power of the scientific method, it remains the standard of scientific discovery today. It is also why, across all metrics, we have never had less suffering as a collective species than modern times.
Where We Might Be Going
Forecasters are generally wrong because the future unfolds through unpredictable secondary and tertiary effects. The future is non-linear and exponential through the concept of compounding. We are not wired to understand compounding.
Some forecasters may get a call right once, but it is rare to have repeated success.
So, I expect to be wrong in this forecast.
I recently read the idea that we may just be a temporary biological vessel for the evolution of intelligence in the universe. Intelligence seems to have occurred spontaneously from trillions of trial-and-error evolutionary iterations in biological organisms, eventually taking root in humans.
As I write this in 2023, we are in the first minute of the first innings of what is likely a new human revolution. We are building artificial intelligence (AI).
These AI systems use large quantities of data combined with programming and computational power to probabilistically predict the next word in a sentence.
But is it really “artificial”?
The word "artificial" implies that something not human. However AI in its current form has been created using our human language data to train algorithms. The same language that evolved over many iterations of mechanically compressing air with our muscular diaphragms across tracheal and oral meat flaps to create sound waves.
The inputs are very human even if the computational abilities of AI for certain tasks are far beyond what our brains can do.
And these human language inputs will undergo trillions of iterations, just like a slowly evolving biological organism would.
It seems to me that this new intelligence, created by a random species of ape on a random planet in our galaxy, will continue the evolutionary arc that was set in place billions of years before us.
Intelligence arose in biological systems and may now be jumping into a new type of vessel.
As homo sapiens continue to drive non-linear secondary and tertiary climate effects through natural resource consumption, there are those who push for extra-planetary colonization.
However, it is hard for me to imagine a scenario where it is more optimal for humans to live on Mars than Earth.
Our physical bodies are built only for Earth and required enormous time scales to get to this point. We don't have time to physically evolve for another planet.
Even if the Earth's climate significantly destabilizes over the next few centuries, it would likely still be preferable for humans to live on Earth, perhaps underground. We are just not evolved to live on a different planet.
If humans are indeed a temporary vessel for intelligence, it does not seem far-fetched that this intelligence would search for a more optimal vessel.
That new vessel (or host, if you will) is currently being constructed from minerals mined from the Earth. These minerals are more durable than biological tissue and have faster electron conduction than a nervous system.
While this new metal vessel still requires energy to power it, it uses energy more efficiently than humans.
Physically picking up biological macronutrients from the environment, putting them into a mouth hole to be broken down by chemicals, absorbed through intestines, run through filters, and eventually directed to a target structure is a system with many inefficiencies.
Given the durability and efficiency advantages of machines, it is a vastly superior option for our collective intelligence to explore the cosmos in a better vessel for space.
It makes no sense, at least with our current technology, to strap primates to rockets in airtight suits with oxygen gas pumped, with the goal of building an artificial Earth like ecosystems on another planet so we can barely survive there.
I think this is the collective human ego believing intelligence must live on in our biological bodies.
We already have the technology to run machines in space. For example, we have satellites, space stations, and spacecraft. Voyager 1, a spacecraft launched by humans in 1977, left our solar system in 2012, 35 years later.
Perhaps we could initially send the AI into the galaxy in the spirit of the scientific method. We could simply send it to make observations, develop questions, perform experiments, and see where that leads us. This is similar to what humans have done throughout our history on Earth.
Perhaps we could eventually send the AI to find an optimal planet where future sapiens could evacuate if we are unable to reverse our planet's climate trajectory. It does not seem hard to imagine this happening in our lifetime.
But perhaps the AI we launch into the cosmos will not be able to assist us on a fast enough time scale, and humans will be wiped out by a global mass extinction event. Our planet has already gone through five mass extinction events. On a cosmic time scale, we are barely a blip.
If sapiens go extinct like the multitude of extinct species before us, the Earth will inevitably adapt and its climate will re-stabilize. The only remaining echo will be the collective intelligence that we managed to place into a metal body and send into the universe.
Is our intelligence destined to jump from our biological bodies into a more powerful, durable, and efficient vessel? Is intelligence even something separate from us, that can be decoupled through human ingenuity?
I don't know. I suspect it links to the ancient human concept of the soul, a form of being deeply felt by humans across all cultures and geographies, thought to be separate from our physical selves. But if I reflect too deeply on the historical arc of our species and the forecast above, I feel a heavy existential weight pressing into my physical chest.
Perhaps the weight I feel is the weight of the human soul.
Lastly, I also feel profound hope and pride that our little tribe of primates, who have all shared the collective cognitive hallucinations of morality, human rights, countries, money and humanoid gods, has through scientific exploration come to understand the fundamental laws of nature well enough to start building a new vessel for our intelligence. I believe that this intelligence now has a high probability of continuing onwards to the cosmos, regardless of how the human story ends.
All I know is that intelligence has emerged within sapiens. Our story is inextricably linked to it, and together we move forward into an unknowable future.