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The dividing line, if ever there was one, between our ancestors and the present human species has been set by the acquired capability to use tools (it goes back to millions of years ago, the oldest proves of humans using tools go back to 2-3 million years ago with homo habilis and homo erectus, predating homo sapiens sapiens). As any dividing line created by historians it is a fuzzy one. There are a few animals that are using tools (from insects to birds and mammals) and even a few that are perfecting tools (some monkeys do). This is no surprise since humans are not at the tip of evolution, all species living today are, one way or another, at the leading edge of evolution. Using tools is part of this evolution.
Humans, however, are the only species living today that is making tools to make … tools. The first “humans” what we may call “humans 1.0” used tools in hunting (first) and in agriculture, to scrape skins and became pretty good in shaping stones and wood to serve the intended purposes. It took several million years to make the leap, to start inventing tools that would be used to make better tools, we may place this invention 5,000 years ago. This requires the capability to imagine what is needed and what is needed to make that. I would say it is an imagination of the second order. That is why I labelled this evolution as “humans 1.2”.
A few more millennia and humans invented a way to increase their strength initiating the industrial revolution (first with steam and then with electricity and the related engines converting the energy in mechanical movement). Yes, the lever and pulley were ways to augment human strength, but it actually traded displacement for strength. The energy was provided by the human worker.
Water mills (3rd century BC) and windmills (1st century BC) clearly predate steam and electricity but converted an energy that was available locally. We really have to wait the invention of the steam engine to have a way to increase human strength everywhere that was desirable.
This has revolutionised our society, increased the GDP and transformed us as human beings. That is why I am labelling this event as the birth of “humans 1.5”.
In the last 25 years (at mass market level) the massive use of computers, particularly impactful in the last decade as they become a continuous presence in our life in form of smartphones, we have seen an increase of our mind capabilities. We can rely on our smartphone to remember numbers, appointments, to help us finding the way, to calculate exchange rates… you name it. More than that. This incredible tool is connecting our mind with an unlimited source of knowledge, the web, and with an unlimited source of services. Notice that this knowledge and these services are the result of million of people that have worked to create and share it. Think about it: the smartphone shrinks the distance to other minds and bring the past into the present.
This is another major leap in the increase of our capability as a species ( the smartphone has reached a penetration close to 50% in the world) and I labelled this as “humans 1.7”.
Why am I labelling humans with a progressive, distinct number? Are humans 1.7 different from humans 1.5? Yes, they are. We are what our genome is creating but that is also part of the story. We are also what we are nurtured in. And the experiences, the context we live in is making us who we are as much as our genomic roots. The experiences we live, what we learn changes our synapses, our brain and there is no doubt that the kind of experiences we live today are quite different form the ones that shaped our grandfathers. Our children are growing in a context that is different from the one we grew. They are different from us, for sure they are humans 1.7, most likely we are humans 1.6 … (look at the nice, although old, clip).
What will it take for the next leap, for seeing the birth of “humans 2.0”, a marked improvement from the past?
This is something I will be discussing in a presentation tonight, and will report on it tomorrow.
