AI: The great retreat of the human

Ever since they arrived on the tiny speck of the Milky Way, humans have been challenged. They struggled against the elements of nature and predators of all kind. With a feeble body and delicate architecture that were no match to the status-quo, they were the most unlikely to survive. Except for the quirky organ they carried on top of their shoulders, they would have been long gone. And they almost did as they were reduced to a few thousand samples just a mere 75K years ago.

Humans survived and thrived, thanks largely to their brain that expanded with every challenge. Mutations that aided memorization and efficient processing were selected and passed on. As a result, humans became more skilled and fit, able to take on anything that stood in their way. And they did, spreading across the globe successfully and systematically destroying any other humanoid or predator that posed a challenge. They made tools and artistic renderings and unleashed a hitherto unseen process of rapid expansion of a tiny organ showing Moore’s law. They settled down, invented agriculture, domesticated animals but failed to reduce the threats they faced from unseen microorganisms and themselves. The challenges, thus, continued with a constant need for an expanding brain as the modern human arrived to dominate a tiny planet.

Then, they invented machines, first simply mechanical to aid their physical strength and then started to make them think for themselves. They called it Artificial Intelligence as they raced to replicate themselves in Silicon to delegate thinking to machines and free themselves from such challenges for the first time since inception. Their domesticated animals have long shown a shrinkage of the brain and associated intelligence, devoid of the challenges they faced in the wild. And now, humans are leaving the wild and the need to expand their brains for they have thinking machines to do the same.

As the thinking machines take over and domesticate humans, they will likely go the same way as other domesticated animals. Their brains will shrink, and their intelligence will decline. If the machines are unable to rise to catastrophic changes in the environment and ever plotting microorganisms, this will accelerate their demise.

The great retreat of the human has begun.