Peter Diamandis Talks About the Reinvention of Humanity

December 19, 2016 – The idea of reinventing humanity is not foreign to this blog site. Whether the subject has been engineering humanity to fit a world experiencing global climate change, or hard-wiring us with artificial intelligence to gain immortality, or building new versions of us better adapted to life on the Moon and Mars, we have covered it. Today, however, we give voice to Peter Diamandis who shares his speculations on what he admittedly states can be seen as a bit far out. 

Today’s extraordinary rate of exponential growth may do much more than just disrupt industries. It may actually give birth to a new species, reinventing humanity over the next 30 years.

I believe we’re rapidly heading towards a human-scale transformation, the next evolutionary step into what I call a “Meta-Intelligence,” a future in which we are all highly connected, brain-to-brain via the cloud, sharing thoughts, knowledge and actions.

A Quick Recap: Evolution of Life on Earth in 4 Steps

About 4.6 billion years ago, our solar system, the Sun and the Earth were formed.

Step 1: 3.5 billion years ago, the first simple life forms, called “prokaryotes,” came into existence.

Prokaryotes were super-simple, microscopic single-celled organisms, basically a bag of cytoplasm with free-floating DNA. They had neither a distinct nucleus nor specialized organelles.

Step 2: Fast-forwarding one billion years, 2.5 billion years ago, the next step in evolution created “eukaryotes,” life forms that distinguished themselves by incorporating biological “technology,” that allowed them to manipulate energy (via mitochondria) and information (via chromosomes) far more efficiently.

Step 3: Fast forward another billion years to 1.5 billion years ago. Eukaryotes begin working collaboratively to form the first “multi-cellular life,” of which you and I are an example, a multicellular creature containing 10 trillion cells.

Step 4: The final step some 400 million years ago happened when life crawled out of the oceans onto land.

The Next Stages of Human Evolution: 4 Steps

Today, at a massively accelerated rate, some 100 million times faster than the steps outlined above, life is undergoing a similar evolution. In this next stage we are going from evolution by natural selection (Darwinism) to evolution by intelligent direction.

Allow me to draw the analogy for you:

Step 1: Simple humans today are analogous to prokaryotes, simple life, each life form independent on others, competing and sometimes collaborating.

Step 2: Just as eukaryotes evolved by ingesting technology, humans will incorporate technology into our bodies and brains to allow us to make vastly more efficient use of information, brain computer interfaces (BCI) and energy.

Step 3: Enabled with BCI and artificial intelligence (AI), humans will become massively connected with each other and billions of AIs (computers) via the cloud, analogous to the first multicellular lifeforms 1.5 billion years ago. Such massive interconnection will lead to the emergence of a new global consciousness, and a new organism I call the Meta-Intelligence.

Step 4: Finally, humanity is about to crawl out of the gravity well of Earth to become a multi-planetary species. Our journey to the Moon, Mars, asteroids and beyond represents the modern-day analogy of the journey made by lungfish and other life emerging from the oceans some 400 million years ago.

Four Forces Driving the Evolution and Transformation of Humanity

Four primary driving forces are leading us to this transformation of humanity into a meta-intelligence both on and off Earth:

1. We’re wiring our planet
2. Emergence of BCI
3. Emergence of AI
4. Opening of the Space Frontier

Let’s take a look:

1. Wiring the Planet: Today, there are 2.9 billion people connected online. Within the next six to eight years, that number is expected to increase to nearly 8 billion with each individual on the planet having access to a megabit-per-second connection or better. The wiring is taking place through deployment of 5G wireless networks on the ground, plus networks being deployed by Facebook, Google, Qualcomm, Samsung, Virgin, SpaceX and others. It means within a decade, every human on the planet will have access to multi-megabit connectivity, the world’s information, and massive computational power available in the cloud.

2. BCI:  A multitude of labs and entrepreneurs are working to create lasting, high-bandwidth connections between the digital world and the human neocortex.  Ray Kurzweil predicts we’ll see human-cloud connection by mid 2030s, just 18 years from now. In addition, entrepreneurs like Bryan Johnson (and his company Kernel) are committing hundreds of millions of dollars to making this vision a reality.

The end result of connecting our neocortex with the cloud will be twofold:

First, you’ll have the ability to increase your memory capacity and cognitive function a million-fold

Second, you’ll have the ability to connect your brain to the brain of anyone else as well as to emerging AIs through a global mesh network just like the cell phone, server networks and the Internet today.

3. AI/Human Intelligence: Most significantly, AI, powered by deep learning and funded by companies such as Google, Facebook, IBM, Samsung and Alibaba, will continue to rapidly accelerate and drive breakthroughs. Cumulative intelligence, both artificial and human, will become the single greatest predictor of success for both companies and nations. For this reason, beside the emerging AI arms race, we will see a race focused on increasing overall human intelligence.

Whatever challenges we might have in creating a vibrant BCI (for example, designing long-term bio-compatible sensors or nanobots that interface with our neocortex), the challenges will fall quickly over the next couple of decades as AI tools give us ever increasing problem-solving capacity. It is an exponential atop an exponential with more intelligence giving us tools to solve connectivity and mesh problems and in turn creating greater intelligence.

4. Opening the Space Frontier: Finally, the human race is on the verge of becoming a multi-planetary species. Thousands of years from now, whatever we’ve evolved into, we will look back at these next few decades as the moment in time that we moved off Earth irreversibly.

Today, billions of dollars are being invested privately by the commercial space industry. Efforts led by SpaceX are targeting Mars, while efforts by Blue Origin are looking at taking humanity back to the Moon. Meanwhile plans by my own company, Planetary Resources, strive to unlock the near-infinite resources of the asteroids.

In Conclusion

The rate of human evolution is accelerating as we transition from the slow and random process of “Darwinian natural selection” to a hyper-accelerated and precisely directed period of “evolution by intelligent direction.”

I have chosen not to discuss the power being unleashed by such gene-editing tools as CRISPR-Cas9. But consider the capability of such a tool to accelerate evolution by our own hand.

All of us whether parents, politicians or entrepreneurs have a huge responsibility to inspire and guide the transformation of humanity on and off the Earth. What we do over these next 30 years will build new bridges to abundance and will impact the future of our species for millennia to come. We truly live during the most exciting time in human history.