Are We Moving Backwards? A Darwinist Approach to Our Evolution with AI

When Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, he could not have envisioned the potential game-changing role technology could play in human evolution. Yet, 166 years and four revolutions later, his theory of evolution tells us more about the collective future of the human species in our increasingly digitalizing world than any of today’s techno-prophets.

Amidst the dystopic foretelling of human extinction by AI and extremist forms of transhumanism, Darwinist evolution gives us subtle but pertinent hints to anticipate the technology’s likely impact on future human evolution in a gradual and more realistic way. This time, however, AI is not an extinction-level threat but a transformative factor gradually changing human life. Just as species adapt to their changing environment, we are adapting – physiologically, cognitively and emotionally – to a world increasingly dominated by digital technologies. So, the real question is not whether machines will wipe the human species out, but how we will evolve in response to living with them.

The central claim of Darwin’s theory of evolution is that the organisms better adapted to their environment will survive, while others that do not will be eliminated by nature. This is known as natural selection or the survival of the fittest, as coined by Herbert Spencer. In the context of AI, this theory has often been interpreted as an assumption of a competition for survival between humans and AI, similar to that between two organisms in nature. AI, however, is not an organic species that has evolved over time through competition and adaptation, but simply a tool created by humans to serve them.

That said, this does not necessarily mean that AI has or will have no effect on human evolution. On the contrary, humans’ level of adaptation to AI may determine the fate of the human race as we know it today.

AI is now an integral part of human life. Being integrated into our everyday environment, it has created new habits and routines that have changed not only how we think but also how much we think, which may, over time, trigger cognitive changes in humans in addition to potential psychological implications. This sounds dystopian, but the signs are already here. A new study by MIT’s Media Lab, which explored neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing, discovered that the use of LLMs could harm learning and long-term brain development. Put simply, the use of AI in the performance of intellectual activities above a certain threshold may lead to cognitive impairment due to decreased brain use. This retrogressive development is not very surprising for one who is familiar with Darwin’s theory. According to Darwin and many other scientists who follow, less used organs may, in time, lose function and even permanently disappear. This suggests that if overreliance on AI continues to grow, human cognitive capacity may gradually diminish due to less use of the brain.

Once triggered, the change may not stop at the brain. According to Darwin’s law of correlation, alterations in one organ are followed by changes in other parts of the body. As such, a prolonged reduction in brain activity might spark changes in other physiological or psychological traits, creating unpredictable shifts in what it means to be human. While evolution is expected to be progressive in the sense that changes beneficial to a species are preserved for continuous improvement, whereas maladaptive ones are eliminated, this is not always the case. Adaptations that are typically harmful or not useful to the species, named by Darwin as “monstrosities,” may also exist. Thus, it is possible for a species to become ‘less perfect,’ with some of its organs and parts being superfluous or useless but kept, leading to a form of retrogressive evolution.

In that scenario, it is not far-fetched to imagine future humans evolving depending on the degree of their interaction with technology, resulting in variations among the human species. Over generations, such variations could diverge enough to lead not to extinction, but speciation of humans; a techno-evolution of our species.

All these possibilities that now seem unlikely will probably stay so for a very long time, given that natural selection “acts with extreme slowness,” which may take millions of years. Still, considering that a new species can evolve even within a lifetime and organisms high in the evolutionary scale change more quickly than those that are low, we may witness the signs of this change sooner than we think. Whether this would be a doomed fate of regressive evolution or a natural development that comes with adaptation to the world we live in is a question with no correct answer. At the end, it will not be AI that determines our evolutionary fate, but our own choices for how we use, adapt to, or resist the technology we have created ourselves.