It’s Evolution, Stupid

Computers make excellent and efficient servants,
but I have no wish to serve under them.

Mr. Spock

Something happened. Something big. Over thousands of years we became the humans we are today.Homo sapiens: to our current knowledge, the most intelligent species on this planet. But are we the most intelligent species? We are standing at the brink of a massive paradigm shift. A shift so fundamental, so far-reaching, and so transformative, that we cannot even begin to understand what is going to happen to our intelligence and us.

We have already developed artificial intelligence; smart robots with surprisingly human traits are running through many homes and even more factories. Industrialized manufacturing and the use of machines to replace physical labor used to be a breakthrough of historic proportion; now this breakthrough fades as just another stepping stone in human development. The fading takes place due to an unfolding advent of intelligence that will transform how we work in factories and businesses around the world. For the first time, we have created a tool that might surpass our own intelligence. What some researchers refer to as the singularity might happen in our lifetime. To some, this development is scary; to others, it is fascinating. And most humans do not yet realize the extent of the consequences behind this dramatic shift. If you think the last fifty years of technological developments were revolutionary wait for the next fifty years to turn your world upside down. And if you thought the speed of change we see today is accelerating at a high frequency, be prepared. We have not seen anything yet. We are facing the most transformative change in about 10,000 years. Industrialization and globalization, the connectedness of minds and machines in the worldwide web, and the use of data as a new currency are mere precursors of what is going to happen next. We will no longer be the only species using reason, experience and intelligence to make sense of our world. Maybe we should rethink calling it our world anyway.

I am asking you, for now, to think big. Let’s see the bigger picture, and gain a good understanding of the driving forces behind the curtain, before we then look at what is actually happening around this data-powered paradigm shift in intelligence we are currently facing. Here is an interesting fact that we are eager to forget or at least ignore it for most of the time: humans have not always been humans.

If we only go back a few thousand years to the point we started occupying most of the landmass on this planet, we were a very different species. (Actually, there was more than one human species.) We looked different, we relied on our hunting and gathering skills, we formed small groups to ensure protection and survival, and we communicated very differently than we do today. The way we live has changed so drastically that we have a hard time imagining how life might have been at the time. The way we connect with each other and the incredible number of connections we learned to handle has turned our social lives upside down. And ultimately we have changed the way we think over and over a