Human evolution in an AI world: Predicting changes in brain size, attention and social behavior

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more common and sophisticated, its effects on human lives and societies raise new questions. A new paper published in The Quarterly Review of Biology posits how these new technologies might affect human evolution. The author considers the inevitable but incremental evolutionary consequences of AI’s everyday use and human-AI interactions—without “dramatic but perhaps unlikely events, including possibilities of human annihilation, assimilation, or enslavement.”

In the paper, the researcher considers (“often with considerable speculation”) some possible forms of human-AI interaction and the evolutionary implications of such interactions via natural selection, including forms of selection that resemble the inadvertent and deliberate selection that occurred when humans domesticated crops, livestock, and companion animals. He argues that technologies that deploy AI interact with humans and affect their lives in ways that can be understood by considering the kinds of biotic relationships between individuals of different species such as predators and prey, hosts and parasites, and biological competitors.

What the researcher says: “The ways such interspecies interactions have shaped animal evolution, including human evolution, can provide some basis for predicting how AI might influence human evolution in the future,” he notes.

Human-AI interactions can resemble human-human social interactions, with computers, and especially AI-driven technologies, becoming increasingly important social actors. It is in these interactions that much of the potential for AI to influence human evolution lies. Through that lens, the review examines AI’s possible effects on matchmaking (such as dating apps), intimacy, virtual friendships, and the criminal justice system.

He extracts several predictions, including the acceleration of recent evolutionary trends toward smaller brains, selection on attention spans, personality types, and mood-disorder susceptibilities. He also hypothesizes changes in intimacy-building and mating competition due to AI applications may influence the evolution of social behavior.

The author concludes that the cumulative effects of human-AI interactions on human differential reproduction and, thereby, gene frequencies and patterns of inheritance, are likely to be small relative to the immediate effects of those interactions on individual lives, well-being and happiness, and the effects on cultural evolution, keeping in mind that predicting how AI might change humanity is difficult and prone to error. “The direction and rate of evolution can be hard to predict even for organisms kept under controlled conditions,” he writes. “Far more so the complexities of predicting selection and resulting evolution of humans in a fast-moving AI-rich world.”

So, what? I think it’s fairly obvious that AI—like all technological developments before it—will lead to changes in human evolution over time. The author of the paper is certainly spot on with that prediction.

The deeper question is what effects will AI have on the way we organize our societies, our organizations and our families?Pulling research from other peer-reviewed sources published in the last two years, my own guesses are these:

• Work as we understand it will disappear—almost every job or profession will have been taken over by AI and robotics within 10 years.

• Societies will become much more controlled and authoritarian since every action we take will be noticed and recorded by AI. The collected data will be used to dictate who we live with, what we buy, what we read or view, what sports we play or even attend, what school we go to (or our children go to), who can vote and what opinions we are allowed to have.

• Inequality will increase. Those who control AI (maybe 300 people worldwide) will possess 90% of anything of value.

• The population will rapidly decrease as the need for workers is eliminated. War, disease and climate will be manipulated as a means of population control.

• Nation states will become less and less important as all economic activity will be controlled by the owners of AI platforms.

• Living to 150 or more will become commonplace—for the tech titans only.

• Private robotic/drone armies will become more important than conventional military establishments.

Of course, since nobody has ever accurately predicted the future (except by chance), I could well be wrong.