How AI could influence the evolution of humanity

This is The Conversation Weekly from The Conversation.

Catastrophising about an AI-dominated future has become the most human of pastimes.

Almost everybody I know who's an expert on AI believes that they will exceed human intelligence. It's just a question of when.

It's become the recurring nightmare, the end of humanity, ushered in not by pandemic, nuclear war or climate change, but by the machines.

or to be more precise, generative AI. My worst fears are that we that feel the technology, the industry, cause significant harm to the world.

I think there's a lot of attention on the big spectacular things that could happen if AI goes spectacularly wrong for us.

But even if it doesn't go that way, even if we retain control of AI

and it doesn't decide to run amok or turn the universe into paperclips or whatever the scenario you're concerned about is,

it's still going to have effects on us, just much more mundane day-to-day effects.

This is Rob Brooks, a professor of evolution at the University of New South Wales in Sydney in Australia.

He's been thinking about the way artificial intelligence could influence the future of humanity.

The arrival of generative AI and large language models such as ChatGPT is already creating a new reality for humanity.

At the moment, people are experimenting with these technologies, using them to find new ways of working and creating.

But what if, over time, as we become more reliant on AI, our relationship with the technology shifts and turns into something parasitic?

In this episode, we're exploring what AI could do to

the evolution of our species, to human intelligence, to the way we interact with each other, and ultimately, to the genes that we pass down to future generations.

I'm Gemma Ware, and this is the Conversation Weekly, the world explained by experts.

I'm joined for this episode by Signa Dean, science and technology editor for The Conversation in Australia. Signa, welcome back to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me. So Signa, today we're going to talk about evolution.

And when I think about evolution, I always think about it as something that happens in the past, over thousands,

millions of years even. It's not something I think about happening in the future and about how we're going to evolve.

Yeah, I think we don't think about evolution in the future tense. And I think that makes sense.

Because as you said, evolution, it's a long term process, species emerge and change.

And it takes many, many generations to do so, particularly when you think about how long the human lifespan is, right?

I think the process of evolution probably is best understood in hindsight, when we see how things played out in the past, we can measure it and kind to track it.

But I do think we can also use that hindsight to try and predict the future. It's just not an easy thing to do.

There are just so many variables. That said, people are intrigued by the future revolution. That's definitely true.

We want to know where we might end up as a species. And it's fun to speculate.

I think that's why it's such a common trope in science fiction as well. Exactly.

And there are lots of researchers who are really thinking about our future in practical terms grounded in evidence of what's happened in the past.

And you've been working with one of them, the researcher Rob Brooks, who we had at the top of this episode. Tell us about Rob and his work.

So yeah, Rob Brooks is one of the foremost evolutionary biologists in Australia. He's won many awards for his popular science writing as well.

And a couple of years ago, he wrote a book titled Artificial Intimacy, which explores human relationships and sexual behavior in light of modern tech, such as dating apps, sex robots, AI.

And in my round, science and technology, we have been covering artificial intelligence lately from just so many different ways, development, controversies, regulation.

But when Rob emailed us with his pitch, it was the first time someone proposed to tie it in with evolution.

His title was, it's time to think about how AI will alter the course of human evolution.

And I think it's a great question to ask. As I said earlier, we are intrigued by our future.

And right now it does feel like AI is everywhere. So shouldn't we consider what it might do to us as a species? Absolutely.

And we're going to hear more of the conversation that I have with Rob in a second.

But before we do, can you remind us, Signe, because I think a lot of us maybe need a refresh from our biology lessons at school.

How does evolution actually work? Yeah, sure. It gets really complex, but I'll try to keep it basic.

So all living things gradually change over time, and evolution is the name we have for this process.

The key to remember here is that there's lots of variation and traits among individuals because our genes constantly mutate, and often they do so randomly.