Could technology convert the widening gap between rich and poor into an evolutionary divergence of our species?

 Back in 2012, I attended a keynote presentation by Bill Clinton. In his speech he said that, “our common humanity matters more than our interesting differences.” This statement struck me as being both profound and profoundly disturbing. While it seemed, on the surface, like an inherently humanist position, it was also a deeply imperialistic one. It’s easy to ignore interesting differences, I thought, when yours is the dominant culture. Prompted by Clinton’s speech, I began questioning some of the contradictions inherent in my own beliefs.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a mystic, paleontologist, and evolutionary scientist who lived in the early twentieth century, believed that human beings are evolving towards a state of spiritual convergence. By the time I discovered Teilhard de Chardin’s writing, my own theories regarding human evolution were already quite developed. Without delving into too much detail, I believe that human beings are evolving towards a state of pure consciousness, a single indivisible essence that can, in many respects, be viewed as the incarnation of God. I was delighted to find that many of my theories were echoed by someone as knowledgeable as Teilhard de Chardin because over the years I have had my fair share of run-ins with academics.

In my twenties, emboldened by the hubris of youth, I went head-to-head with one of the world’s most revered paleoanthropologists. This internationally reputed scholar argued that human evolution had essentially come to an end. “We might lose our baby toe,” he said, offering a small concession. I was horrified. How could he be so myopic? Was it possible that a lifetime dedicated to one narrow angle of study had made him blind to the bigger picture… or was I mistaken? Had we in fact reached the end of our evolutionary journey?

Twenty years later I believe that I know the answer to both questions. The human species is undoubtedly hurtling towards a new incarnation… but our evolutionary progress is not being propelled by Darwinian forces of change but by our own technological mastery. As Edward O. Wilson said, “we have decommissioned natural selection and we must now look deep within ourselves and decide what it is we wish to become.” Viewed from a paleoanthropological perspective, human evolution may indeed have run its course, but from a techno-evolutionary point-of-view we are on the verge of transcending our biology and, as such, perhaps even our mortality.

Co-founder and Chancellor of Singularity University, Ray Kurzweil, believes that by 2045 Artificial Intelligence will have reached levels of sophistication that will force human beings to merge with machines, giving rise to a post-biological era. He refers to this transcendental moment in time as The Singularity. “It will get to a point,” says Kurzweil, “where change is so fast that we won’t be able to follow it unless we enhance our own intelligence.” David Dalrymple, MIT’s youngest-ever graduate student, explains Kurzweil’s theory in another way. “The Singularity,” he says, “is the point where the exponential rising curve of our technology suddenly becomes the exponential rising curve of our selves.”

While Kurzweil’s vision of the Singularity is extremely vivid and fairly specific, there are many other futurists positing their own versions of our imminent techno-enabled transcendence. While no one can be sure of exactly what this future will look like (life beyond the Singularity is inherently unknowable), there is general agreement that it will arise from the convergence between exponentially advancing technologies like artificial intelligence, genetics, robotics, virtual reality, biotech and nanotechnology. Jason Silva, an effusive techno-philosopher who is quite literally ecstatic about our enlightened future, points out that, “what currently fits in your pocket will eventually fit into a single blood cell and connect directly with your body.” This very concrete example of advances in the human/computer interface clearly illustrates that we are indeed on a trajectory towards human/machine convergence. But as those of us who believe in Teilhard de Chardin’s Cosmogenesis have realized, convergence and divergence are entwined in a complex dialectic.

While Spiritual Convergence is predicated on our “common humanity”, as Bill Clinton refers to it, it is a philosophy of inclusion and therefore equally dependent on diversity and the celebration of all those “interesting differences” that make up human culture. Unfortunately, in a world where our interesting differences often undermine our common humanity, the notion of a techno-mediated transcendence elicits inevitable questions about how inclusive this transcendence will actually be. Will our mastery of biology herald a new era of unification, or will it give rise to evolutionary divergence, creating a transcendent elite and a second, biologically inferior class of beings, no longer considered human?

Divergent Evolution is the term used to describe the accumulation of differences between groups, which can eventually lead to the formation of a new species. Divergent Evolution, or speciation as it is often called, is ubiquitous. In fact, the monotypic human species is unusually non-divergent when compared with other species. The bird kingdom, for example, is comprised of about 10 000 individual species, while insect species number in the millions. But the story of man can also be plotted according to a series of divergent paths beginning about 85 million years ago when primates first diverged from other mammals. About 70 million years later another divergence took place giving rise to the Hominid family, and a further divergence took place 10 million years after that, separating what would eventually become the first bipedal Hominin from gorillas and chimpanzees.

Imagine having been there when this separation took place, witnessing the very moment at which our forefathers had to choose between those two paths, diverging as they were, in that ancient wood. Of course the history of evolution clearly shows us that change occurs at a glacial pace and one would never have witnessed this epic divergence in a single moment. And yet, modern history also shows us that the speed of technological change is accelerating… so we may in fact come upon those divergent paths yet again… and this time we may be forced to bear witness to that epic split.

Bestselling author and TED alumni Juan Enriquez says that we are entering a period of “hypernatural evolution”. Enriquez claims that over the past 10 000 years human evolution has occurred up to 100 times faster than at any other time in our species history. As a result, he says, “we are transitioning from a hominid that is conscious of its environment into one that drastically shapes its own evolution. We have already started to evolve from Homo sapiens (a conscious hominid) into Homo evolutis: a Hominid that directly and deliberately controls the evolution of its own and other species.”

While I find this notion invigorating at a philosophical level, I cannot shake the overriding concern that power of this magnitude will unleash the greediest and most evil of our human tendencies. While technology may indeed be endowing us with the power of Gods, our moral maturity is barely out of diapers. Ray Kurzweil claims that human beings are fundamentally transcendent. “We didn’t stay in the caves,” he points out, “we haven’t stayed on the planet. Biology is just another membrane to be transcended.” Jason Silva agrees. “What it means to be human,” he says, “is to be Transhuman.” While I cannot argue with their logic, I find it difficult to share their unbridled optimism. Don’t get me wrong; I covet the notion of immortality as much as the next mortal, but I am skeptical about our species ability to wield this Godlike power with the benevolence of Gods. Last time I checked we were waving our most advanced discoveries above our heads like clubs… and techno-enabled evolution will make the Tomahawk Cruse Missile look like a donkey jawbone. It has become cliché to quote Lord Acton when he said, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” but technology that gives us the ability to selectively engineer our own immortality must surely be viewed as the epitome of Absolute Power.

I grew up in a country where racial discrimination was hard-wired into society. Two decades of democracy have done little to erase those bitter memories, so it is not difficult for me to imagine a world in which our newfound liberties are once again yanked away by some greedy authority. Looking back, Apartheid was clearly a morally distorted institution, and yet at the time millions of reasonable people where caught-up in its spell. What prohibits another malevolent meme from invading our collective psyche? I am not Christian, but an uneasy sensation befalls me when I consider this passage from the bible, “the gate is small and the way is narrow and few be they that find it”. Will the ruling class invoke this passage, or some other religious pretext, to defend their right to engineer divergence despite the disenfranchised class of subhuman refugees who might result from it?

Thomas Piketty, a French economist widely considered to be the Karl Marx of our generation, believes that capitalism exacerbates wealth inequality, perpetuating a state in which the rich get richer while the poor become increasingly impoverished and disenfranchised. In his book, “Capital in the 21^st Century”, Piketty draws on data from the past 200 years to support his hypothesis, clearly demonstrating that the rate of return on capital has consistently outstripped the rate of growth in the economy leading to an increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich. Piketty’s book is groundbreaking because it is the first study of wealth inequality to be supported by extensive data. Until now, the discussion about inequality and income disparity has been largely political. Piketty has made it scientific, using sophisticated data analytics to reveal the true, potentially destabilizing nature of capitalism

Piketty’s investigation debunks a commonly held theory that the rapid growth in the mid-twentieth century proves capitalism’s tendency to benefit greater society. Piketty explains that, while inequality decreased between 1945 – 1973, this was not due to the underlying dynamics of capitalism and progress, as often argued, but as a contrast to the instability that preceded it during the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. During the volatile period from 1914 – 1945 there was massive destruction of private wealth and therefore a very low rate of return. Juxtaposing the artificially retarded growth experienced during this dark period against the rapid economic and demographic growth that followed has effectively masked capitalism’s underlying tendency to exacerbate wealth inequality.

While all economists agree that some level of inequality is vital to the proper functioning of capitalism, Piketty believes that excessive inequality isn’t only dangerous for the economy, but for democracy as well.

Piketty may be an economist, rather than a futurist, but extrapolating his findings into the century ahead paints a disturbing picture of a world moving towards levels of inequality likely to trigger severe social disruption. Overlay this dystopian socio-economic view of the future onto Kurzweil’s predictions of a technological singularity and you arrive at a picture of the future that looks terrifyingly like an H.G. Wells novel.

Regardless of how one feels about capitalism, there can be no doubt that it has become the engine of progress in most developed countries. But capitalism itself is just a cold economic system; it is actually consumerism, our fanatical drive to constantly acquire new stuff, that has essentially gamified progress, attaching material rewards to recognized achievements and thereby driving society towards ever-increasing levels of complexity. But our dysmorphic obsession with consumption is eating society from the inside out, driving us inexorably towards a cul-de-sac of depleted resources. When the planet can no longer service our insatiable appetite for consumption, those who can will discard it like a plastic wrapper from a candy bar. But the winner-takes-all game-mechanic driving consumerism is likely to limit access to this escape route, making it a luxury available only to those who can afford it.

The next stage of human evolution is upon us. Whether technology will enable biological transcendence within this lifetime or not is just a question of time. We cannot avoid what is baked-in to our DNA. As Jason Silva says, “we are the species that transforms and transcends. It’s what we are. It never stops.” But we are also the species that is conscious of its own evolution and we must use this unique gift to direct that evolution in such a way as to transcend our moral limitations not just our biological ones.

Achieving immortality is not simply a case of replacing our disposable physical form with a more durable one; it is about achieving a state-of-grace in which we can honestly say that we are able to live with ourselves for eternity. In order to achieve such a state-of-grace we must overcome greed and fear, we must embrace the notion that our common humanity is forged from the individual strands of our interesting differences, and we must accept that the psychedelic fabric of our spiritual unification will be woven from the multicolored threads of our diversity. But it is not enough for us to simply preach inclusiveness; we have to actively fight inequality by revising and re-engineering the polarizing game-mechanics that underlie modern capitalism and consumerism. We need to do this not simply to redress the inequity of modern society, but to defend ourselves from the looming bifurcation of our species.

If we do not act now, we may one day be forced to accept that we engineered an irreversible evolutionary divergence that left the poorest among us to fend for themselves on a dying planet; a planet whose ability to sustain life had been terminally depleted by an elite class who used technology to transcend its limitations. When that time comes, will we look back on these forsaken ancestors with a sense of triumphant superiority, or with the intense pang of regret that a mother feels when abandoning her child?