Manolis Kellis

And it's perhaps no surprise that we became the dominant species of the planet.

Because yes, there's so many dimensions in which some animals are way better than we are, but at least on the cognitive dimension, we're just simply unsurpassed on this planet and perhaps the universe.

But the concept that if you now trace this forward,

We talked a little bit about evolvability and how things get better at evolving.

One possibility is that the next layer of evolution builds the next layer of evolution.

And what we're looking at now with humans and AI is that having mastered this information capability that humans have,

from this quote unquote old hardware, this basically, you know, biological evolved system that kind of, you know, somehow in the environment of Africa and then in subsequent environments of sort of dispersing through the globe was evolutionarily advantageous.

That has now created technology

which now has a capability of solving many of these cognitive tasks.

It doesn't have all the baggage of the previous evolutionary layers, but maybe the next round of evolution on earth is self-replicating AI, where we're actually using our current smarts to build better programming languages and the programming languages to build, you know, ChatGPT, and that to then build the next layer of software that will then sort of help AI speed up.

And it's lovely that we're coexisting with this AI, that sort of the creators of this next layer of evolution and this next stage are still around to help guide it and hopefully will be for the rest of eternity as partners.

But it's also nice to think about it as just simply the next stage of evolution where you've kind of extracted away the biological needs.

Like if you look at animals, most of them spend 80% of their waking hours hunting for food or building shelter.

Humans, maybe 1% of that time.

And then the rest is left to creative endeavors.

And AI doesn't have to worry about shelter, et cetera.

So basically it's all living in the cognitive space.

So in a way, it might just be a very natural sort of next step to think about evolution.

And that's on the sort of purely cognitive side.

If you now think about humans themselves,