Manolis Kellis

But with evolution, it's almost the opposite.

almost the exact opposite, that it appears that it's speeding up exactly as complexity is increasing.

And I think that's just the system getting good at evolving.

So the best way to understand the future is to look at the past.

If you look at the trajectory, then you can kind of learn something about the direction in which we're heading.

And if you look at the trajectory of life on Earth, it's really about information processing.

So the concept of the senses evolving one after the other, you know, like bacteria are able to do chemotaxis, which means moving towards a chemical gradient.

And that's the first thing that you need to sort of hunt down food.

The next step after that is being able to actually perceive light.

So all life on this planet and all life that we know about evolved on this rotating rock.

Every 24 hours you get sunlight and dark, sunlight and dark.

And light is a source of energy.

Light is also information about where it's up.

Light is all kinds of things.

So you can basically now start perceiving light.

and then perceiving shapes beyond just the sort of single photoreceptor.

You can now have complex eyes or multiple eyes and then start perceiving motion or perceiving direction, perceiving shapes.

And then you start building

infrastructure on the cognitive apparatus to start processing this information and making sense of the environment, building more complex models of the environment.

So if you look at that trajectory of evolution, what we're experiencing now, and humans are basically, according to this sort of information, theoretic view of evolution, humans are basically the next natural step.