Evolution Of Humankind Into Meta-intelligence

We live in an era where exponential growth has enabled the human mind to do extraordinary things. This, no doubt, has heralded the new phase of human evolution; Evolution into Meta-intelligence.

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Looking at the trend of evolution, you can infer that patterns do repeat themselves in a sub-sequential manner. And humankind is currently in the midst of a repeating pattern. 

But for us to fully understand where the future of evolution lies, we have to consider the past and the present.

Trip down history’s memory lane

Life, as we know, started as a very simple single-celled organism called the Prokaryotes, which were just bags of cytoplasm that have DNA. But as time passed, Prokaryotes started incorporating biological technology. Here I’m referring to Mitochondria, Golgi apparatus, Nuclear membrane, etc. 

What did life do next? Life went from Prokaryotes to Eukaryotes (which were more complex than the Prokaryotes). Then these evolved to multi-cellular life form, where thousands or millions of cells joined together to form complex whole organism.

The fact is; humans are collection of about 10trillion cells, which make up the tissues, the organs, and every other part of us.

Now we are looking at how technology; which humankind is creating in this era; has altered the rate if evolution. Technologies like: human-machine interface, alpha-genetics, hybridoma technology, and synthetic biology.

Natural selection gives way to intelligent selection

The basis of evolution; before now; has been on natural selection (Darwinism), but this era has greeted humans with an amazing transformation, which has never been experience in the history of evolution.

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Humankind is evolving into meta-intelligence. Here’s what I mean by “meta-intelligence” in a layman’s term: 

A single human is made up of about 10trillion cells which work together. And the population of humans on earth is about 7billion. Now the idea behind meta-intelligence is this: the entire human population being incorporated as single intelligent specie, working in sympathy to another. This is like a singularity.

Believe me, the rate of evolution has sped up lately, and this is linked to the presence of technological advancements.

The rate of evolution in this era is 100million times faster than it was – Dr Peter Diamandis; founder Singularity University [paraphrased by me]

The concept of “natural selection” is giving way to “technological selection” and “intelligent selection”

Change; approaching

Now we have seen the past and the present, in terms of evolution.  But what are we expecting to see in the future? Very simple, we would be expecting a “change”. Change in our bodies (humankind would merge with machines to make us more efficient), change in information processing (every single person’s data will be processed as a single whole); we would finally achieve the singularity.

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Think about this; a time would come when the total computational power of all computers in the world would be comparable to the absolute brain power of the entire race of humankind. That means; humankind would develop stronger bond with AI.

Believe me, this is already happening. But there has been a speculation that singularity would be achieved sooner than we think, and AI would have surpassed humankind in smartness. But the thing is; if we would be merged with AI, we would maintain our supremacy.

Singularity dawns

On prediction; by the year 2099, the line separating Virtual reality and the real world must have blurred out. The VR would merge with the real world; just like the movie “the king of fighters”.

By this era, humans would not depend on themselves for survival and sustenance; machines would dictate the pace. Even our foods would be synthesized by nano molecules.

But one very unique thing is that humankind would live about natural limitations, and “death” would have died. Human’s lifespan would be extended indefinitely.

And finally, machines and humans would attain equality in status, but not in number. Because machines would outnumber humans (organic humans).

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When this era comes, interstellar travel and colonization would be like just any other journey on earth, and we would see the emergence of other sophisticated intelligence. Humankind would be regarded as “multiplanetary species”.

Well, all I can say is this: we have a really awesome and exciting future ahead of us. Let us fasten our seatbelts as we take this ride into the future together.

Thanks for reading

References for further reading: Ref1, Ref2, Ref3, Ref4, Ref5