Whence Hence?

Does Homo sapiens have a future?

Our social institutions have evolved much more rapidly than us over the last few thousand years, but most of their innovations are basically schemes to cope with those instincts and habits, which have hardly changed at all.

We are now too numerous, and the destructive power at our disposal too enormous, to continue trying to get everything for ourselves (capitalism), deferring all solutions until after the next election (i.e. to our children and grandchildren) and treating anyone different from ourselves as a hostile tribe. We are close to a catastrophic collapse of all those social institutions.

So… what can be done, if anything?

I suggest that gradual, incremental refinements of our institutions and improvements of our attitudes is a hopeless dead end. We’ve tried it; it doesn’t work. We must face this fact and consider some extremely radical options:

We could change ourselves. Education is not enough. To achieve the degree of change needed we would need to modify our own genome in an attempt to become more intelligent, more far-sighted and more cooperative, among other things. The new species would hardly resemble Homo sapiens mentally, and might look different physically as well. The remaining H. sap. hordes would of course attempt to exterminate the new species like they did H. neanderthalis.

We could augment ourselves. A powerful AI with a direct interface to our brain might be another way to give ourselves adequate intelligence to run the world we’ve built; mechanical prostheses might give us the prowess to defend ourselves against the inevitable attack of the un-enhanced. But if we retain our instinctive greed, short-sightedness and xenophobia, I fear this might merely be giving a nuclear weapon to a child.

We could seek a technological fix for a few of our immediate crises. I won’t even bother to address this option; it is merely kicking the can down the road. I’m sorry I even mentioned it. (Must be that short-sightedness gene kicking in!)

We could build AGI robots and turn the management of the world over to them. This might actually work, but only if we are lucky enough for the robots to (for some reason, perhaps nostalgia or gratitude) consider us worth keeping around. In a world of universal abundance we might be able to get along within an agalmic social structure. In another million years we might finally get over our hunter-gatherer instincts. Or the robots might just clean the slate.

Don’t like any of these options? Then suggest something different.

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