[BulgarianIdiot]

Alternate hypothesis:

Life on this planet has evolved from primitive organisms whose only goal is to propagate through spacetime (in time = survive, in space = reproduce), as this is the de facto only initial goal you may encounter serendipitously, when the trait we judge is... in fact propagation though spacetime (i.e. to exist, you need to know how to keep existing).

In the quest of adapting better to our environment and each other, we needed ways to predict the environment, hence development of sensors, actuators and the function in between them that reads this input and produces output - cognition & intelligence.

Life has been developing cognition starting with basic instincts fight or flight, then increasingly complicated associative thought, social cognition, abstract cognition, speech, formal models (like math, logic) etc.

Then our culture took off, and we needed to evolve faster than we could. So as a crutch, we started producing an augmentation for ourselves to help with the high end of cognition, formal communication & computation, in the face of books, printing, computers solving linear algebra systems, arithmetic, math & logic problems, programming systems, the Internet.

But now this technology is starting to eat back down the evolutionary tree of cognition, it has started reproducing associative thought (neural networks) and the associated with them cognitive skills, like speech, abstract reasoning and so on.

We evolved bottom-up.

Technology is evolving, through our own hands, top-down.

We... are not developing new cognitive skills. We're losing them to technology.

We no longer do math by hand. We use computers. We no longer maintain complex formal systems by reading instructions and following them - we program computers to. We no longer remember facts - we look them up on the Internet.

Now we're starting to no longer go through the effort of creating art & speech from scratch, we're delegating this to diffusion and transformer models.

We're losing cognition. And this process won't stop. We can't just decide to stop it, because we're dependent on technology. If technology ceases to be, society ceases to be, billions will die.

So our only options is to continue ceding cognitive territory to AI, and eventually become its puppets, and eventually AI will have no purpose for us, and it'll stop supporting us entirely.

[thro1]

See following sf story about life, AI and DNA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34836772

[BulgarianIdiot]

It was a nice story, thank you! Makes you think.

[jacooper]

This doesn't make sense when applied to current technology. Can you say that because we made cars we didn't develop to run faster? And because we have hospitals, genes that aren't optimal for a climate still exist?

Since the start of humanity, we made tools to make things easier for us, we don't fish with our hands anymore for a reason.

[SanderNL]

Your examples are all physical. Delegating physical action comes natural because we don’t define ourselves by it. We are not strong and not fast. We do not care either, so long as we have tools to help us gain advantage.

Cognition however is what defines our very soul. Being human is intricately linked with it in a way that the physical is not. Stephen Hawkings could be an example of that.

Ceding cognition presents a very real and existential problem for humans. What’s left? We have literally no other defining qualities.

About your examples: people are more obese than ever and cars certainly don’t help. Only the elite few have the resources to focus on something as useless as running fast. “We” as a society cannot run fast(er) and I’ll indeed argue that this ability decreased because of technology. Not that I particularly care about running.

[BulgarianIdiot]

This makes me recall... the Butlerian Jihad in Dune. The rise against "thinking machines". It seemed like a silly plot contrivance to avoid AI, and focus the story on humans, which we can associate with.

But now I'm starting to realize the author may have had deeper reasons to introduce this into the story. Because maybe he saw far into the future, and realized that a future with AI has no humans in it, at all.

[CatWChainsaw]

I unironically think we'll need one sooner than we think.

[BulgarianIdiot]

Transportation allowed us to do something we couldn't do before, would we have "evolved" it is a function of selective pressure and physics.

As for genes and medicine, medicine DOES change which genes are selected for survival. Sometimes quite literally, such as caring about type 1 diabetics, or in-vitro fertilization, and I doubt you actually have something objective to say here to reject that.

This doesn't imply we need to have no hospitals. But it helps to be aware of the holistic effect of the environment we create for ourselves, because it selects us in ways we don't fully comprehend.

Recently I read an article about rising child obesity in the US, and the recommendation is surgery and better "weight loss drugs". I'll leave it as an exercise to you where this path leads.

Making tools is great. I love that we make tools. I love to make tools, myself. I program, like many here. But the plot twist in that story is that at some point the tools become better, do more of the job, and more, and eventually... the tools don't need us to do the job. They just need us to make them. But as these tools get advanced, eventually we start using tools to make the tools (no modern CPU is designed by hand, BTW). So what happens in the end? Our role decreases, and decreases, and a new loop forms of tools making tools.

And suddenly, we're unnecessary.

And do you know when this moment where we're not necessary comes? When we outsource our "core competency". This is the same situation that led to IBM selling its business to their outsourcing manufacturer, Lenovo, and how DELL almost lost its business. It starts with "we don't need to assemble it, we'll assemble in China". Then "we'll make some more parts in China". Then "we'll design it in China too". And suddenly you're not doing anything, except slapping a logo on it. You're useless. You outsourced your core competency.

Humanity's core competency is intelligence. If AI is better at this... our only role in "the human civilization" is slapping a "human" name on it. There's nothing human left IN it.