IEEE Future Directions
Related Articles
Evolution has marched along the 4.5 billion years of our Planet. Although life seems to have started some 3.5 billion years ago, evolution was already at work before that time, creating new and more complex molecules that eventually gave rise to the first forms of life. It has never stopped, it keeps going on today.
However, if we focus on a single species we have many cases (most actually) where evolution stopped simply because that species disappeared. The 5 great extinctions of the past wiped out most species.
Researchers studying evolution pointed out that the human species is unlikely to evolve further. Our siblings have already disappeared and we are the last species of homo sapiens. In order to further evolve, generating a new species we would need to incur in a random variation (that’s possible) that would pass a natural selection process leading to a divergence from the current species and this is no longer possible for the foreseeable future. We no longer have on Planet Earth niches isolated from the rest of the Planet were a divergence can strengthen to the point of becoming a new species. We keep mingling with one another and our genes keep getting exchanged .
We might, in the longer term, create new niches, like sending astronauts to colonise Mars. At that point the separation conditions that are required for the emergence of a new species will be satisfied, but we are far from that.
Humankind has diverged for millennia (millennia are too short on the evolutionary clock to create and select a new species) in their extended phenotype: communities separated in space have evolved different cultures and therefore different extended phenotypes (just think at the many languages spoken on the Planet, even though their number is decreasing ever more). In this last century the Planet has shrunk to the point that even these divergent extended phenotypes are becoming rare and difficult to emerge.
However, in this last decades we are seeing unexpected evolution avenues on the horizon, not the ones of natural selection but the ones enabled by “design”. Genomic manipulation and symbioses with machines are opening up new possibilities, and give rise to many questions.
The Visionary Innovation Group at Frost&Sullivan published an interesting study on Transhumanism exploring these possibilities and the impact they might have on business. They are considering three main “evolutions”:
- Evolving the human body
- Evolving human thought
- Evolving human behaviour
These evolutions are the result of converging evolution of biotechnologies, human machine interaction technologies/symbioses and behavioural aspects (prompted by new possibilities and change in culture).
These same areas are being explored in the IEEE FDC Symbiotic Autonomous Systems Initiative and are also the topic of a Delphi study to which you are welcome to participate.
I will dedicate a significant part of this month, as I am on vacation, to discuss these aspects.
Thinking received a boost from writing and with some writing forms was silenced and privatized. Today it is externalized again in technology and shared almost in real time. Digitization allows thinking to be stored and shared instantly and also, in an increasing number of cases assisted and augmented by artificial intelligence.
The symbiosis between digital (later quantum) and organic thinking is developing under a tacit contract that the technical is at the service of the organic. Reciprocally the organic, taking advantage of the lions’ share of initiatives, will improve the digital. I personally don’t quite see how this contract could be usefully reversed.