Human machine coevolution Humanity has always evolved with technology. At a time this process was slow enough to allow biological evolution to take it into account, bringing us our shrunk mandibles and weak teeth, as well as our flat bellies and shortened digestive tracts. For the past ten thousand years the accelerating pace of exponential technological change introduced profound transformations in our ways of life. At this pace biological evolution definitely can't keep up.
Our individual behaviors are constantly reshaped by new technologies arriving. Romans were afraid that the habit of silent reading would impact the art of rhetoric. When printed books appeared the fear was that people would stop talking to each other. These days it is fashionable to lament the constant use of cell phones and texting. We are born into a world that is a black box to us, and uniquely underdeveloped both physically, behaviorally and cognitively among animals. This forces us to be dependent on our parents caring for our physical and mental development, and it naturally puts us in a deep trust relationship with them, and the rest of the extended human family. Whatever world we find around us, whichever truths we are shown or told, we take for granted. It would have been very difficult for a child in the middle ages to question the Aristotelian truths about the world, and the social order of the feudal classes. The positive flip side of this is that whatever astonishingly miraculous gadgets are developed by the generation of the parents, whether horseless carriage (car), distance communication (phone), or immersive virtual reality, for the children born into them it will be as natural as a tree, a flower, or a dog. Growing up interacting with these new parts of the world will not be newer or stranger as any other part of the world. Figure 13: The cyborgs are coming, Nigel Ackland opens the door. The ubiquitous presence of high speed wireless internet connections, at least in higher income countries, is defining new behaviors. Being able to check every possible datapoint, verify a piece of information or connect disparate sources on the fly becomes an almost Pavlovian reaction. As I write this on a beach of Cayo Levisa in Cuba (yes, I know, amazing!), I am re-learning how it is to be disconnected after thirty years of being constantly online. I call the sum of the services available in realtime through my smartphone my exocortex. I am proudly dependent on it, with a dependence that is not that of a drug addict, destructive and fruitless, but with the dependence that is similar to that from my gut bacteria, helping my digestion. The text is sprinkled with the "XXX" signs I use to annotate places that need fact checking, where in the absence of access to search engines I know I need to go back, or reference materials to books, names, to be quoted in the appendices of the book. (Hopefully as you read this the only remaining signpost is this one above in quotes.) My adaptability is such that I can happily experiment with being disconnected for this limited period of time. But I would never choose it to be my daily experience if the alternative were available. I am also shortsighted, and can walk around wearing no glasses without tripping, but I would not choose to not have them; I would not go to the cinema without my glasses. Experimenting with technology is made possible by its personal scale today. Personal computers, smartphones, ever richer components of the maker movement putting energy generation through solar panels, financial tools through cryptocurrencies, manufacturing with 3D printers and so on in the hands of individuals is thrilling. A few months ago I got an implant, becoming a bona fide cyborg. The first goal of getting the implant, which today is worn by a pretty small number of people is achieved through this: to open the conversation about these technologies, and breaking down the social barrier to their adoption. We have been accustomed to restorative implants for over fifty years, since the first pacemakers, and nobody would dream of saying that somebody should rather die than getting one. On the other hand, augmentative interventions appear to be more controversial, and people often make reference to fairness, and level playing fields, when confronted with the possibility that others in their peer group could rely on physical or cognitive augmentation to achieve their personal or business goals. Luckily we have been able to arrive to positive conclusions in these conversations in the past already. Yes, we have glasses to restore our vision if we have a defect in our eyesight, but we also have binoculars, and telescopes that greatly extend the range and acuity of our unenhanced vision. An other reason to get implanted for me was to experiment first-hand with technology in general, and with that of the NFC implants in particular. An important difference between previous RFID chips is that those only had a serial number in them, that could not be changed, while the NFC chip can also hold other information in its memory, it is writable, and can be used for different applications: identification, access control, transactions are some of the applications that are possible already today. Fig 14: Digital assistants capture our attention. What is going to be the limit to this individual adaptability? As changes keep accumulating, some of them necessarily slip away. When communications technology evolved more slowly, between telex, telefax, and email there were decades of time to evaluate, and adopt them. If you are passionate about social networks you may have been on Friendster and MySpace before being on Facebook. But if you realized their allure, and benefit, it could very well be the case that you started with Facebook only, which is perfectly fine. But the changes keep accelerating and these days the messaging platforms are evolving so fast that it is hard to keep up with them: Skype for sure, maybe WhatsApp, but WeChat or Snapchat, or Telegram? The guarantee of coevolution is that it not only requires us to adapt to technology, but also technology to adapt to us, by becoming easier and easier to use. This ease of use lowers barriers to adoption, making it possible to move fast from one platform to another, nimbly. A good example of the evolution in the ease of use of technologies comes from speech recognition. The first interactive speech recognition solution from Dragon Systems required a specialized hardware add-on for personal computers, and literally hours of training to have it recognize a handful of words. The next version a few years later, called Dragon Dictate, did away with the expansion card, "but" "still" "asked" "each" "word" "to" "be" "pronounced" "separately". Very cumbersome, even if life-savingly revolutionary for quadriplegics who could use computers for the first time. The successive generation called Dragon NaturallySpeaking allowed continuous speech, and at first needed about forty minutes of training for good results. With the same name, new versions year after year got ever better, not needing any training anymore, and being able to recognize speech right out of the box with very high precision. These days the in-the-cloud version of the Dragon engine, licensed by its current owner Nuance, powers the speech recognition capabilities of Apple's Siri both on Macintosh and on iPhone. The program becoming easier and easier to use, its appeal dramatically widened from those with disabilities, to professionals creating large amounts of text like journalists or translators, to anybody simply using their phone with voice rather than tapping on the screen.
Being able to rely on smart systems that understand what eventual problems are and how to solve them is very different from how things used to work. Evolution, what we call the "state of nature", is not only blind, but carefree. Even if it produces wonderful and amazing solutions, it not only takes a long time to do so, but it does it through the literal killing of uncounted billions of individuals. And there is no way to protest, nobody to complain to! As we formed societies, first in tribal groups, then cities, nations and now supra-national entities, their very reason to exist was to support their individual members, and to maximize their benefits and opportunities to achieve their goals. The structures of society evolved to become richer, more and more complex, able to satisfy a wider variety of needs and behaviors. We have hundreds of thousands of explicit and implicit rules about how to constructively live in a society, and understanding, managing, abiding by, and enforcing these rules, and analyzing their consequences and updating them to face novel conditions is a major component of a lot what we do. Education, commerce, security, law, even entertainment and literature have their focus or a major focus in this. We are now starting to have smarter and smarter systems that rather than blindly supporting a given set of rules, understand what the set of constraints that they can usefully operate under are. As these systems get spread and adopted more widely, and they permeate our daily lives at higher and higher granularity, we are going to start to take them for granted. These systems of course will not work in isolation; they will communicate with us, taking into account our feedback, and among each other. Individual smart objects forming networks, and the networks themselves connecting. The name for the network of network of communicating smart objects is
. The Internet of Things According to the exponential increase in power and decrease in price of computation and communication thanks to Moore's Law, it is becoming easier and easier to incorporate these functions into everyday objects that become digital. At that point their value starts to be a function not only of their original purpose, but of the sum of the parameters that can be communicated, aggregated, understood, and acted upon by the network connecting them. A bridge should never crumble for lack of supervision and verification. It should, as well as any other piece of small or large infrastructure, be able to monitor its own state of health, and alert the appropriate teams to intervene as needed, and before it is too late. A car should not let a drunk human drive it speeding through red lights. With the development of self-driving cars this is already becoming a reality. Regardless of the small-minded objections with regards to insurance, and mistakes or wrong decisions that robotic cars will also unavoidably make, avoiding the millions of deaths that will not occur because of avoidable human error is going to be worth implementing this specific smart system. Self-driving cars will be always in motion, rather than sitting idle 90% of the time as their dumb counterparts do. The corresponding 90% decrease in the number of cars in circulation, the elimination of the 30% and over area now devoted to parking spaces, the possibility of optimizing the type of transportation based on the need on demand, the elimination of any range-anxiety for electric vehicles, the degrees of freedoms that stay-at-home mothers, young or old people without a driving license, and the disabled are going to gain, are just some of the staggering consequences that are going to transform our urban landscapes, our daily habits, and our working, social and individual lives.
The impact of smarter and smarter computing, even without full blown AI and AGI around, has already transformed the way we work and live. It made us smarter too. We can more rapidly collect information, develop opinions, and verify them against new data or the opinion of others. We can seek out and collaborate with people of similar interests regardless of their geographical proximity. There is the castle of Fenis in Northern Italy, in the Valle D'Aosta region, whose walls are full of graffiti, of the signs of writers. They are not however left by contemporary vandals. Hundreds of years ago the lord of the castle would ask his visitors to sign the walls as a permanent guestbook, to show and show off how acculturated they both were: they could read and write. If a few hundred years ago this was still exceptional, and even today there are too many who can't read or write in the world, we have definitely raised the bar. And with the help of our smartphones we can raise it further still. Relying on effective education systems complementing human teachers with materials, exercises, stimulation, and verification, in any language all over the world, is now possible, and it only depends on our willingness to design, implement, and widely deploy such a system. Once it is available, we will be able to step up to the challenge to make sure that everybody can achieve the equivalent of today's capacity of reading and writing: a universal need to be able to program computers.
When computers were born, they were initially not even programmable, but special purpose, cable to execute a single task only. Programming computers initially meant slowly and painfully wiring them up for a given calculation, or, after a while, feeding them cryptic punchcards, and waiting for the results to come back hours or days later, as a dedicated priesthood handled the electronic brain itself. Interactive terminals first, then personal computers made programming available to many more people. The development of high level programming languages meant that problems could be formulated in a way that computers could understand them, as well as other people reading the program could improve them rather than having to practically start from scratch. It is definitely at a point today where anybody can learn one or more programming languages, and more and more people do so. When you tell your microwave oven what to do, or your dishwasher, you are programming them. When you set up a reminder for your calendar by dictating it into the phone, it is the same. These tasks are elementary, and maybe the next phase is going to come when connected appliances will allow conditional branching, loops, and recursion to be part of the intuitive orders that we'll give them. The complexity of our world is increasing and it can only be handled through interfaces that are not only intuitive and natural, but also through the progressive abstraction on explicit and detailed instructions towards higher order goals and the proactive satisfaction of needs. When the Internet of Things is going to multiply by many orders of magnitude the number of smart objects around us, we will not be able to succumb to the anxiety we feel today, programmed into us by the smartphone itself, as its reserve battery power indicator enters the red zone of alarm. On one hand the smart objects will have to fend for themselves, as the robotic vacuum cleaners do today, by remembering where the wall socket is and retracing their path to recharge as needed. On the other hand, the degree of understanding and anticipation of our needs, mental and emotional statuses will have to profoundly increase through the next stage of what can be called
. Emotional computing Keyboards, optical character recognition, and speech recognition are all methods for generating input to our computers. There are now more and more reliable, and fast and powerful enough methods for face recognition, and, as a consequence, to use our facial expressions as inputs too. Recent models of photo cameras have automatic settings that delegate the shooting of a photo not only in terms of aperture or other optical settings, but also in the timing of the shot itself. The camera recognizes when the subjects smile and have their eyes open, and takes the photo accordingly, maximizing the probability of us being satisfied by them. This is an example of computers reading emotions. Figure 15: User interfaces are evolving to read our thoughts. The experiment that Facebook conducted on a few hundred thousand of its users a few years ago created a lot of buzz. For everybody, but those with a handful of connections or liked pages, it should be clear that the newsfeed can't show the totality of the posts that occur in a given amount of time, unless they scroll so fast as to make them hopelessly unreadable. Consequently it is natural and necessary to show only a fraction of them, which is what Facebook routinely does for everybody's feeds. The criteria for showing certain items evolve all the time, and, given Facebook's proprietary and competitive nature, are not per se public. (A good challenge for the supporters of open source collaborative projects is to come up with a successful alternative for Facebook, where the social network does not need to monetize you having you become a product for their advertisers, is fully distributed so that it cannot be shut down or censored, and whose algorithms for the selection of news stories or friends' posts are both available to the users for optional analysis or tweaking, as well as totally open and transparent.) Paradoxically the reason for a lot of backlash about the Facebook experiment came about because, for once, the criteria for selecting the news items became known. A few hundred thousand of the users received on average news with negative keywords, and a corresponding group received on average positive content. The hypothesis of the experimenters was that as a consequence each of the members of either group would be more likely to write posts that corresponded to the emotional charge of the news they were shown. Obvious enough, you'll say. But this is a computer writing human emotions. We are emotional machines, and we must make sure that computers recognize this, and in the process they become emotional machines themselves. Many of our tasks can be carried out better or worse given the time of the day; they are not strongly dependent on a given hour or minute, but they are definitely influenced by our emotional states. Being able to leverage a fine-grained understanding of our needs, goals, and behaviors also from an emotional point of view of something as simple as our task list is going to increase our well-being and our productivity.
The power of emotional computing, as well as of many of other technologies described here, whether current or future, is staggering. Accountable industries recognize that they can't ignore externalities, and prepare to take ownership of the entire lifecycle of their products. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies have for a long time adopted ethical committees to oversee, analyze and guide their experiments, to make sure that they don't discount the ethical implications of their procedures, regardless of the assumed benefits of their final products. This level of social awareness of the ethical consequences of powerful actions and technologies will necessarily lead to the adoption at a universal level of best practices by corporations and organizations. Next time you meet a student of philosophy, tell her that you believe her profession will see an explosion in hirings in all industries. It will be essential to augment the human understanding of these topics by adequate personal and interpersonal tools, automating and scaling the process to make it reliable, and allowing its adoption by everybody.
The level of awareness and self-awareness that these tools are going to help us achieve is unprecedented in history. The ignorance, racism and xenophobia that drove so much of past conflicts are inadmissible in a world of knowledge, multicultural understanding, and globally connected tolerance (and thermonuclear weapons). Being able to recognize the needs, values, and emotions of others is our ability for empathy, and we are going to create tools for extending and augmenting this, overcoming the limitations of what our natural senses and emotional reactions would otherwise dictate.
The term "computer" originally meant a person, typically a woman, that would sit in front of mechanical calculators, and perform repetitive, mind-numbing operations all day. Our digital computers are now able to perform those operations billions of times faster, and the human energy and creativity previously devoted to them can be deployed elsewhere. When mechanical looms started to increase the productivity in the textile industry, and a single one of them could do what dozens of workers did previously, the movement of Luddites opposed this change, going as far as to destroy the machines that stole the human jobs. But were those jobs worth preserving? In the trajectory of our technological civilization a surprising data point is that the average height of the members of the first agricultural societies was lower than their predecessors in hunter and gatherer ones. This is closely correlated to available calories, health, lifespan, and quality of life in general. During the wave of industrialization in the 19th century, the quality of life of the working classes was abysmal, with no protection whatsoever against exploitation, no services of education, health, or universal child labor, but the trend still kept going towards more and more people moving to cities. A few years ago Amazon bought the maker of robots for close to a billion dollars, whose self-driving platforms could hold the carts that pickers used in its warehouses. The various products ordered online would be in any position in the warehouse, on various shelves, and rather than having to check where was what, the human warehouse workers are now guided by the carts to the right place, where they put the package needed in the cart ready to be packed and shipped. Just a few months ago, in order to naturally move to the next step, Amazon organized a contest to develop a dexterous robotic hand together with a vision system that could be mounted on the self-driving robotic platform, which would do away with most if not all of the warehouse jobs occupied by humans today. As computers are capable of more and more tasks, many worry that there will be nothing left for people to do. This is a misplaced worry, just as it was during the first industrialization two hundred years ago. But for technological progress to translate to human well-being, we have to recognize the lessons from the past. It took ten thousand years for the agricultural societies to arrive to the point where we are now, with three percent feeding everybody else. It will be a very bumpy ride before we can fully deliver the benefits of smart systems to everybody, and we can and we must shield those who can't keep up from the worst consequences of an otherwise blind and selfish change.
We have built a wonderful, rich global civilization that can step up to the next challenge of truly caring for its members. Too many societies neglect their fundamental responsibility to nurture, sustain and shield individuals who can't be simply discarded and let to fall by the wayside as would certainly happen in what before humankind was the natural state of evolution. It is not a question as cruelly and mistakenly approximated of weakening the gene pool. The rich tapestry of human experiences and opportunities cannot be measured by the primitive and reductive scale of mere fitness. We are not beyond evolution, but we are beyond a blind evolution that doesn't have the capacity to embrace and sustain the potential that each individual expresses. There is no guarantee that we will be able to solve our future challenges just because, amazedly stumbling from crisis to crisis, through smarts and sheer luck we've been able to do so for our past ones. Collaborating on better forecasting of what the forthcoming problems are going to be allows the building of scenarios and the testing of methods before they are needed, and deploying them more rapidly. Science and engineering are wonderful methods of attacking even the hardest problems. We need to be able to rely on the inventive power of individuals, working in teams that enable them to cross pollinate ideas, and to complement each other's strengths, in a cultural, economical and political environment that reliably supports them, with the power of the longer view. And we need open sharing of peer contributions that allow the ideas to be pooled for the common good of our shared goals and values. Excessive modesty is almost always wrong, a tool for control, where initiative is stifled, and the burden and stigma of potential failure stops the individual from even trying to succeed. Humbleness is almost always right, recognizing that the community is what gives support, and a solid starting point for the excellence to emerge, not being isolated and uniquely standing alone in a desert. The role and fate of geniuses and revolutionaries in science and exploration who have been unhumble in their quest and contrary to what everybody else was thinking at the time, but still right, and proven right by their success, and strengthened if impossible to systematize and emulate in their following and historical significance, is especially dramatic. Are seven billion individuals enough? The next pandemic, the incoming asteroid, escalating political and military conflict terminating in thermonuclear war? Are these going to be solvable threats? Are we ready to attack the unknown unknowns that could blindside us? The potential of the human mind to reach new heights of exploration and understanding must not be squandered. The responsibility of the global civilization is to assure that everybody has the opportunity to contribute to this quest.
The black box of the universe has been progressively unlocked by human exploration. We peered inside it, shining a light in its various corners, deciphering what we saw, and using the pieces as building blocks for new tools. Intelligence, and our technological civilization, are unique as far as we can see now. The emergent phenomena of their making, that look out on the world and what happens in it with open eyes, rather than just letting events unfold, creates new responsibilities that we are starting to face now. One of the corners of the black box, where very interesting emerging phenomena have accumulated, is now ready to be looked into through the sharp light of science. We left the understanding of morality to dogmatic views, Bronze Age clay tablets, unexamined, very long. Not only should we feel empowered to step up to the challenge of assessing it with the tools of science, without it having any residual medieval feeling of inferiority, to proudly test the results. It is now a necessity that we do so given the emergence on the global scene of autonomous machines, whose decisions are going to be impacting our lives, and are going to be unavoidably moral and ethical in their nature. Yes, the self-driving car's balance will shift very rapidly and with staggering force to the side of it being beneficial. It is not going to be one of those cases where it is hard to decide between the two sides of a coin. But that is not a reason enough to avoid the clear, transparent, open, and accountable setting of rules and behaviors that guide its decisions, even when they are not going to be bearing consequences of life and death. The classical example of me swerving in front of the self-driving car on my bicycle, and it having to choose between crashing into a school bus full of children to avoid me or killing me, is useful, if it lets us start asking questions about how those decisions are made. It is not a question of working the answers out beforehand. There is no full table that, given the input, can give you the right output. In the matter of a few milliseconds, not only in the scenario of the example, but billions of smart machines in tens of billions of cases every day, will have to work out the hard way what they want to do. Only if there is a robust and open debate about the foundations of morality as a science is it possible to take the next step, and ask engineers to implement the rules governing that science in their products. When the first computers were born, the theories of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics explaining the laws of behavior of single electrons were fully formed. Their applications were in environments that were too complex to predict from a theoretical point of view, and they needed thorough experimentation, invention and innovation, which were as fundamental as the theories, amply demonstrated by their success, and by the Nobel prizes awarded in physics to experimentalists, as well as to theoreticians. We must aim to do the same now, at a different level in a different subject, without hesitation, to make sure that the hand of those implementing smart autonomous machines is guided by solid scientific theories about what it means to be moral. This quest is going to be very controversial, especially in the eyes of those, retrenched in ever shrinking territories of dogmatic worldviews, who turn away from reason and science being the best guide to explaining the universe, and to themselves give reason to our actions and purpose to our lives.
There is a surprising pride in many who claim not to understand mathematics, and not to follow science and its wonderful discoveries. It is disconcerting and a bit painful to see the contradiction in these individuals who benefit from technological, medical and social advances that science generated, but deny their need to an understanding of the fields, their tools, and the solid platform they create for human development. To make it worse, some of these are people of culture, of literature and art, whose false perception of the distinction or even contradiction between the scientific and humanistic worldview clouds their otherwise refined judgements. The beauty of the world and the capacity of perceiving it are not diminished at all by scientific understanding; if anything they are heightened by it. Marveling at the complexity, working up the courage to dare to keep exploring breathtaking vistas of knowledge and its powerful applications belong to those who can apply their clear minds unclouded by arbitrary superstitions to the task. As we shine the light of reason on expanding areas of our world, behavior, and its consequences, it is fundamentally important to claim the right to a naturalistic spirituality, that expresses the heightened state of mind and the joy of the endeavor, that unites and exalts communities of likeminded people to achieve what they would think otherwise impossible. The refined tools or ritual, music, shared purpose and strong community can and must serve the goals of building a society that is proud of its achievements, and humbled but made more determined to succeed by the challenges that lie ahead. With no reliance on the supernatural, the metaphysical, and the superstitious, embracing a vocabulary that is rooted in a shared understanding of the power of reason and which must be defended from the hijacking of the meaning of the words that get corrupted in falsely balanced analyses, this spiritual practice can unite globally those who are ready to explore the future of humanity with open eyes. The future of humans and humanity Our understanding of what it means to be human has deepened and broadened in the last several hundred years. At least we don't burn people at the stakes claiming they are witches. Our perspectives have profoundly changed as we started to embrace and then implement the idea that our lives were worth living, living well, and that we could have the power to make them better, and to build a world that could be better for our children and descendants, opposed to the bleak resignation that we could only find betterment (or condemnation) in a hypothetical afterlife. The kinds of human societies that we've built have shown to be able to nurture, and bring to their full potential, larger and larger numbers of people. We are now potentially ready to take further steps, to embrace the challenges that come with recognizing unnecessary suffering, eliminate injustice everywhere, and to fully grow up to the possibility that we are indeed able to take responsibility for our destiny. Necessary transhumanism? The philosophy and worldview of transhumanism see humans as fundamentally defined by their capacity of recognizing and overcoming their limits. The very definition of humanity as such becomes dynamic under the can-do, proactionary pressure of exhilarating possibilities. Once again, no guarantees, but the future built by progressive, curious, entrepreneurial, and adventurous individuals aggregated in open and tolerant societies that are welcoming to experimentation, is much more likely to find multiple paths towards its goals. Conserving to an excessive degree, while worthy of museums, is not the best way to embrace the future and adapt to its needs. What we admiringly see as the supposed perfect balance of nature, in reality is a dynamic chaos, teetering on the verge of extinction from the point of view of any species, which only our limited perspective sees as idyllic. And even museums through their curatorial activities represent a facet of reality, just a slice of what they conserved, with the rest inaccessible, closed away, ineffective in teaching and influencing decisions, as if it didn't exist. To be able to embrace change is necessarily including the understanding of the impermanence of any status quo, and the moving of observation to a new layer, to higher values that understand the dynamic unifying the series of experiences and forms of existing. The wide spectrum of human behaviors is going to be complemented by the possibility and the opportunity of experimenting with more radical degrees of freedom, that transform the body, and the mind. Understanding this possibility, and respecting those who want to preserve their identity unchanged, but allowing those who want to explore what it means to become fully human under these radically new conditions is going to be one of the greatest conversations that will shape society in the near future.