• Question: How do you think Artificial Intelligence will impact human evolution?

    Asked by 834radg34 to Reka on 10 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Reka Nagy

      Reka Nagy answered on 10 Nov 2016:

      That is an incredibly insightful question!
      Let’s see, the state of AI today is not super advanced, although we do have some clever machines like IBM’s Watson or Google’s Deep Mind. There are still probably not impactful enough to actually affect human evolution.

      Now, what would happen if we had AI that would start doing our thinking for us? There are some areas of science where computers could take over a lot of the research – there’s actually a handy calculator that predicts how likely it is that your job might be done by robots in future: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34066941
      According to this, the easier it is to automate something, the more likely it is that robots will be able to do it in future – that makes sense.

      But back to your initial question – let’s say AI has taken a load off your shoulders so you now have a lot more free time to do whatever you wish, and you don’t need to remember so many facts, because the AI can quickly remind you of these, or look them up for you. This could have an impact on evolution, primarily by reducing the size of our brains.

      The reason we can do so many complex things is because of how large our brains are compared the overall size of our bodies. A brain this large needs a lot of energy, however, and our bodies try to be as energy efficient as possible, cutting out processes that use energy unnecessarily. So if AI were to take over a lot of the thinking and doing that you used to do yourself, over time the size of our brains might evolve to be smaller, to reduce the amount of energy that they need to use.

      However, day to day work is only a very small part of humans – we are social, thinking, tool-making creatures, so a lot of our brain power is used for these things. So even if AI take over a lot of our work, we will still need to use our brains for a bunch of other things to keep functioning as humans.

      This is a very tough question to answer at this point in time!

Comments