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The Next Stage of Evolution?

The Next Stage of Evolution?

Last updated on: June 3, 2026 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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The Next Stage of Evolution? 2026-06-01T20:14:48-04:00 Gene Veith

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Yesterday’s post was about the shift in the tech world away from efforts to develop a narrowly-focused AI for specific purposes to the attempt to develop a “superhuman” AI that can outdo human beings.

It turns out that this tech hubris has an even greater ambition, in which AI and its related technology become the next stage of evolution, in which the biological will be replaced by the digital.

So reports Eduardo Porter in his article for the UK Guardian entitled Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong? The deck gives more detail: “A new belief set is uniting some of the wealthiest men in the world around a ‘transhuman’ future – actual humanity be damned.”

He begins with this Darwinian scenario proposed by the father of ChatGPT:

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, took to the Internet a few years ago to propose that homo sapiens would be the first species “to design our own descendants”. In his best case scenario, the “merge” between humans and artificial intelligence occurs at some point over the next 50 years. The alternative, where we remain simply human and the machines follow their own path, is more ominous. “If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it – in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond – they are going to have conflict,” he wrote.

He quotes Elon Musk, who said, “it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” We biological beings are nothing but preparers for the digital beings who will supersede us. As Porter explains Musk’s tech metaphor, “our role in the history of the cosmos [is] reduced to that of the low level code that boots up a computer before you can run sophisticated programs on it.

But Musk retains a hope for us biological types. He advocates the merger of flesh-and-blood humans with the superhuman digital. In that, he is a conservative. The co-founder of Google goes much further:

Musk is on the tame side of the evolutionary proposition. According to Silicon Valley lore, he once pushed back against Google co-founder Larry Page’s claim that our next manifestation, to follow in the steps of the meat-and-bone humans you see walking about today, would necessarily have digital form in order to spread throughout the galaxy. (In fact, he recently testified in court that it was those concerns that prompted him to found OpenAI with Altman.) Meat and bones do not make for efficient interstellar travelers.

Well, surely Page has a point. How else are we going to travel at the speed of light, the bare minimum for exploring the galaxy? Biological “meat-and-bone humans” can’t do that. But digital minds can just beam themselves throughout the universe. And since they don’t need bodies, they won’t have to worry about being killed by lack of oxygen, starvation, or aliens.

Porter says of the tech billionaires,

In their minds, they are on their way to build the next phase of humanity, a “transhuman” future. In this future, they can satisfy their desire for immortality and assert power over the cosmos as transhumans multiply and expand across the galaxy. Their ultimate goal: to execute on a techno-mystical dream to distill the essence of what it is to be human, consciousness and all, into bits of information to be downloaded as binary code on to some non-biological substrate such as a silicon chip, or beamed through space as electromagnetic waves.

With this as their goal, says Porter, they are indifferent to the “meat-and-bones” humans who are destined to be supplanted by the “transhuman” machines they are building. Their vision, says Porter, “justifies steering technology along a path that is, at best, indifferent to the needs, hopes and aspirations of everyday humans in a quest to deliver a future that only looks like utopia to these masters of the universe.”

Who cares if artificial intelligence obliterates humdrum human labor when it offers us the opportunity to transcend our body and conquer the galaxy? The fantasy directs the technology: rather than building economically useful tools that can help humans expand their capabilities, the overlords of AI are sinking vast resources into a dream of building superhumans.

My question: why are the investors, the government, taxpayers, local municipalities, and other “meat-and-bone” human beings slated for replacement obediently putting up trillions of dollars to indulge the fantasies of these wealthy science fiction fans?

If the next stage of evolution is for the biological to be surpassed by the digital, shouldn’t we expect some kind of struggle? If Darwin is right, which he isn’t, shouldn’t there be a competition for survival, a conflict within and between species to see which one is the fittest? Sam Altman agrees that there should be, but where is it? Meat-and-bones biological humans seem to be lying down in supplication before their digital successors. The dinosaurs may have died out, but they didn’t fund the development of mammals and engineer their own demise. Why are we?

Apparently, Darwin isn’t right. Nature–meat, bones, biology–has a way of winning out over human pride and folly. That is to say, the created order always asserts itself against human delusions.

Illustration: AI image generated by the author via ChatGPT. [From the Cranach post Those Who WANT Humanity to be Replaced by AI.]

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