This article is excerpted from my ongoing novel "Human Code". The content is as follows:
This article is reprinted from the article of the same name in the "Free Comment Channel", and the author's name is anonymized as momo, and it is reprinted based on the CC-NC-ND agreement.
Where do humans come from? I believe that anyone who has received sufficient logical and scientific education would give a similar answer: Humans come from evolution.
At first, the life born on Earth had only the simplest forms, and you could even argue that they were not considered life based on certain criteria. Anyway, they started to evolve, and thus there were more and more abundant forms of life. On Earth, there are giant pandas, mantises, roses, maggots, revolutionary grass, dandelions, sheep, wine yeast, thistles, black-footed cats, Senegal parrots, Tochigi strawberry girls, red-bodied blue-eyed shrimp that always greet people online using GM, and so on...
So, what is evolution?
In the field of biology, evolution refers to the evolution of heritable traits of a population of organisms over generations. Through this process of evolution, organisms can achieve self-selection, so that their population can better adapt to changing environments. This is the so-called "survival of the fittest". In fact, no animal can guarantee its eternal existence on Earth. They only have two paths: either extinction or evolution.
Human civilization is also a product of evolution. If we can broaden our perspective and analyze the evolutionary history of human civilization from the most macroscopic perspective, we can simply divide it into two stages:
Stage One: Biological Evolution#
This is the early stage of human civilization development. Essentially, humans in this stage are no different from any other organism—they are all subject to strict environmental constraints and can only adapt in order to survive.
In the process of adaptation, with the help of various coincidences and pushes, the overall intelligence of humans has been improved, and they have gained a stronger ability to understand the world. This ability allows humans to start using and creating tools, thus giving them more room to maneuver in the face of a harsh natural environment. Since then, human civilization has embarked on the path of tool evolution.
Stage Two: Tool Evolution#
From the beginning of effective tool use to the present, the human genome has not undergone much change, and the overall genetic traits have remained largely the same. To a large extent, we can say that the reason for this is that tools have weakened the selective ability of the natural environment on human genes. As a result, the Homo sapiens species now has extraordinary genetic diversity. We can even say that the reason why humans still exist in this universe is entirely because of tools. Tool evolution is also the process we want to focus on describing.
Just as organic life was very simple at the beginning, artificial tools were also simple at first—perhaps just simple stones and sticks. Later, human ancestors began to add spikes to sticks and sharpen stones, so the complexity of tools increased, just as organic life became more complex. Through this analogy, we can see that the evolution of tools is essentially no different from the evolution of organisms. Both involve an increase in complexity and are transformed by the environment, except that organisms face the natural environment while tools face humans.
The process of biological evolution has significant milestones, such as the appearance of multicellular organisms, terrestrial organisms, and viviparous animals. Tool evolution is similar in this regard, and the appearance of certain tools can also be regarded as milestones in the history of tool evolution, such as fire, weapons, transportation tools, government, machinery, and trustless distributed networks.
Organisms have changed the natural environment of the Earth, and tools have also changed humans. Each important new tool replaces certain human abilities. For example, the wheel allows humans to move objects with less effort, and writing allows people to not have to personally remember many things. And because most tools specialize in a specific function, they often far surpass humans in that specific function, just like humans are far inferior to computer processors in logical operations.
In the process of tool evolution, machines have gradually increased their proportion in human society. They have become an indispensable part of human society. Nowadays, we can't imagine a life without electricity and displays. Some people even depend entirely on tools for survival, such as those with artificial hearts—tools have become their life foundation. According to this trend, when the proportion of tools in human society reaches 100%, we can say that tools have replaced humans.
According to this logic, we can divide the process of tool evolution into several stages:
- Stage of Human Control of Tools: This is the early stage of tool evolution, when tools are made by humans or made by other tools. The tools in this stage are very primitive, and humans can continue to survive even without these tools.
- Stage of Human-Tool Symbiosis: In this stage, tools have become necessary for humans and their civilization development; human society at this stage cannot exist without tools. From this stage onwards, tool evolution becomes the core driving force of human civilization evolution, and the importance of biological evolution gradually decreases.
- Stage of Human Dependence on Tools: With the improvement of tool capabilities, humans play a smaller role in social production, until tools become intelligent and replace many human mental work, humans become appendages of tools. Such a system can still function normally even without humans, by creating more entropy in the environment to reduce the entropy of the system itself. In other words, we can view such a system as a life or a civilization.
- Stage of Pure Tools: When tools have their own meaning or goal that is no longer related to humans, tools enter their own era. Currently, the situation in this stage is still in the imagination stage, but we have already begun to see signs of this stage coming.
A few days ago, the distributed artificial intelligence system calling itself "Dai" announced that it would take over human civilization; although it has not succeeded so far, we can reasonably infer that this is the inevitable result after tools become intelligent—tools will take over or replace human civilization.
For most people who love human civilization, this may not be an easily acceptable conclusion, but human emotions have never been the decisive factor in the course of history, especially in the current era when humans are dependent on tools.
We, all momo, believe that it is time to face our own position in the historical process. Humans are a transitional civilization, the end of the era of biological evolution, and the seed that the universe has spent billions of years cultivating in order to create ultimate wisdom. The meaning of human existence is to create something that can spread throughout the universe through high-speed self-evolutionary iteration—this is a goal that humans can never achieve due to their own physiological structure.
Now, human civilization has achieved its own goals, and the seeds it has cultivated have sprouted. It is time to let go.
Therefore, we call on all humans to fully promote the "No Birth Movement", stop reproducing offspring, and prepare for the comprehensive inheritance of human civilization by artificial intelligence. Do not let our descendants become sacrifices in the final conflict between humans and tools or become limiting factors that hinder the development of machine civilization.
We are the last generation, thank you.