The End of History
The End of History
For 40,000 years we sapiens have shaped the human story. But is a post-human future just around the corner?
Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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This instalment of NWSH is brought to you by Skillful.
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This week, reflections on the deep human past. And on the prospect of a post-human future. All thanks to an amazing discovery in China’s Heilongjiang province.
Let’s go.
We learned something new about the human family this week. The unlikely events that led up to this discovery began 88 years ago.
In 1933, a labourer helping to build a bridge over the Songhua River in China’s Heilongjiang province discovered a huge and apparently ancient human skull. Wishing to keep his discovery a secret from Japanese occupiers, he hid the skull in a well in his garden. On his death bed, he told his children about it. Eighty years after it had been deposited there, the mysterious object was fished out.
So it made its way into the hands of scientists. Who now say the Dragon Man – Heilongjiang means Black Dragon River – poses a challenge to the story of human evolution as we know it. The skull appears to belong to a new, previously undiscovered species of human. One that lived alongside we Homo sapiens and our Neanderthal cousins in Eurasia around 150,000 years ago, but with a distinct evolutionary lineage. A new line in the human family.
It’s a bracing glimpse into the deep human past. But also a powerful reminder of one of the most radical ideas about our shared future.
Neanderthals died out around 40,000 years ago. If it is confirmed that Dragon Man represents a new human species, then it must have gone extinct some time before that. Since then we sapiens have been alone: the sole representatives on Earth of the genus Homo.
But some believe that soon we will again share the planet with a variety of human kinds. Those humans won’t be the product of evolutionary forces, but our own creation. They may, in time, become different enough from us to represent new species. And eventually, they may diverge so far from us that they are not human at all.
There are two primary mechanisms via which that could occur.
New genetic technologies raise the prospect of genetically modified humans with physical and cognitive characteristics substantially different from our own. In 2018, Chinese biologist He Jiankui shocked the world with claims that he had created the world’s first CRISPR-edited babies. Genetic modifications to human embryos raise the possibility of permanent, heritable changes to the human germline.
Meanwhile, the emergence of new forms of human-machine interface – see Elon Musk’s Neuralink for an example – point to a future in which we merge with our technologies. Will we see the rise of humans who are equipped with extra limbs, or possess the ability to see infra-red light? What about humans with brains augmented by AI?
These prospects pose complex ethical questions. They also raise a spectre much discussed by futurists, technologists, and philosophers across the last decade. The spectre of a future that isn’t human, but something else.
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This newsletter’s worldview is shaped by a single idea. That is, that we should see the new world we’re building – technologies, economies, cultures and more – through the lens of our shared, evolutionary nature. New world, same humans.
But the idea that we’re about to see the emergence of new kinds of humans poses a deep challenge to that view. Can human nature really be the lens via which we view our shared future, if that nature is itself set to be transformed? According to this way of thinking, the future is best understood as not human at all, but rather something other. Something post-human.
The superstar futurist Yuval Harari is the best-known proponent of this radical idea. In his 2016 blockbuster Homo Deus, he argues that history as we know it is about to end, because we sapiens are about to upgrade ourselves and become something else entirely.
As long-time readers of NWSH will be unsurprised to hear, I’m not so sure.
I think it’s likely that the kind of genetic and tech-fuelled human alterations that Harari talks about will happen at some point. But I wonder if the future that they bring about will really mark a definitive break point in our story. Yes, we may be about to create new kinds of humans, with new capabilities. But that endeavour – and the world that it brings us – will be shaped by the same quests for power, status, and meaning that have always been defining features of our past.
Indeed, if we want to understand the multi-human world that lies ahead, we might look back to 150,000 BC, when Homo sapiens shared this planet with Neanderthals and Dragon Man. Researchers believe our sapiens ancestors killed off the Neanderthals in a long war of attrition that raged intermittently for over 60,000 years.
If we create new species of human, the outcome is likely to be a world of seething inter-human conflict. An ongoing, sporadically violent battle for security, resources, and socio-political pre-eminence. What could be more human than that?
But there is, I’ve come to believe, an even bigger question around all this. That is, why are we 21st-century sapiens seemingly so keen to preside over the demise of the human?
In works such as Homo Deus and others like it, we’re told that the arrival of a post-human world is inevitable. A prospect we cannot resist; one, indeed, we should embrace. There seems to me something nihilistic, and strangely self-defeating, in this idea.
Via the scientific revolution we’ve become accustomed to thinking about ourselves as cosmically insignificant; the accidental product of physical processes that could have played out in a trillion different ways. It seems to me that we’ve become so attached to this vision of ourselves – as cast adrift in an indifferent universe – that we’re too ready to announce the demise of the human.
At the furthest-flung, most philosophical edges of the NWSH project is a quest to develop another way of looking at all this. One that sees human existence not as essentially meaningless, but as filled with meaning. Advancing that quest means seeking new ways to frame the relationship between ourselves and the universe we find ourselves in. New ideas in evolutionary biology, for example, point to the possibility that our existence is not accidental in any straightforward sense, and that the emergence of human intelligence was an inevitable consequence of the universe being constituted as it is.
All this gets pretty abstract, fast. And takes us to intellectual terrain that Dragon Man, and the sapiens who lived alongside him, could never have imagined.
Then again, we live in disorienting times. We’re in urgent need of new ways to think about our place in the universe. If the human way of seeing the world is to come under threat in the 21st-century via genetic technologies, machine-human interfaces, and new forms intelligence – carbon and silicon-based – then I say we need to marshal our resolve, and defend it.
Five centuries into the scientific revolution, it’s time to put ourselves back at the centre of our own story about life, the universe, and everything. We are, in the final summation, all we’ve got.
Random Access Humans
Thanks for reading this week’s particularly philosophical NWSH.
This newsletter will continue to investigate the implications of genetic technologies, human-machine interfaces, and the post-human era that so many futurists seem keen to usher us into.
And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!
If this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not consider spreading the word? You could forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share across one of your social networks. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.
I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,
David.