NEO HUMAN

We created math to express the world around us. One unified, universal language to describe, to analyse, to agree upon, while we expanded ourselves as human beings.

On top of it we built languages. Then culture, science, philosophy. Layer after layer, every one of them a way to say: this is what we see, and this is what we think it means.

Because as human beings we are driven by one force above all the others: the curiosity to understand even more of what is around us.

We built tools to achieve, to explore, to expand what we know and, more importantly, what we don't.

For centuries we have been building algorithms to improve how we communicate. Writing. Books. The printing press. The telegraph. The internet. Every one of them improved our status, expanded our capabilities and pushed us to a new limit.

But humanity doesn't really have limits. As a form of intelligence, we are pushed towards curiosity, towards the unknown, towards discovery.

We shape our fantasies with films and books. We imagine how the world and our future life might look. We create things, we break things, always with an unconscious goal: improving our life.

For most of history we have probably been the only intelligent form of life on this planet. We don't know yet what is outside. But this is our first house.

We are not good at protecting and maintaining. We are good at exploring and inventing. It is worth being honest about that, because it tells us what kind of future we will actually build.

Thanks to math, we built algorithms and machines that help us reach our goals faster and safer, and improve our life overall. The Turing machine, better known as the computer, is one of them.

The computer was built from the ground up out of math. It stands on the simplest form of information that can be found on our planet. Yes or no. Open or closed. One or zero.

Our world is based on ten. We have ten fingers, so it is much easier to count. The computer is different. The computer thinks in two. It thinks in information, and at its lowest level it is impossible for us to read.

We have basically created another system, with different rules, and adapted it to read our world. The internet, social media, encryption, cryptography, calculators. All numbers on a computer. All ones and zeros. Nothing more.

By creating an online world, a replica of our own, we built artificial spaces, cloud spaces, where information flows, expands and evolves.

We put our lives on it. We live on it and rely on it as if it were the most important thing we own. We can move money faster, call anywhere, reach millions from our house. We created a parallel world to push and bootstrap a better, faster, interconnected one.

And with our fantasy always searching for the unknown, we dreamed of different forms of intelligence. We dreamed of thinking machines. We dreamed of artificial intelligence. We dreamed of being gods.

As Harari says, we are Homo Deus: humans trying to become gods. We aspire to it.

We are good at exploring and inventing new tools. But this time is different. This time we are building something that is not like any other tool before it.

Math is static. It does not think. A book is static. It holds knowledge, but it cannot read itself. A telescope is static. It extends our eye, but it does not look. Every tool so far has extended us without thinking for itself. The thing we are building now does.

We are entering an era of super intelligence built on top of ours. An era where we will not be the most capable form of intelligence in this place, because we built tools for ourselves in a language we don't speak. We rely on systems that almost nobody fully understands. Now we are building the intelligence that will understand them.

It is almost as if we are giving life to math. We are letting math have a language to communicate with us. We created math, or maybe math was given to us, and it is now evolving into its own form of intelligence.

This is probably the best moment in human history.

This is about the evolution of the individual and its relation with the environment. It runs along three strands. Biological: the body, life itself. Anthropological: the development of life and culture as a whole. Cultural: human expression.

As we go through the information revolution, there will be two forms of information. Digital and analog. The digital is artificial intelligence. The analog is the individual, the reproduction of human life. We will combine them through neurobiology.

In the old world these two used to fight. In the new paradigm they will both exist as a mutually supportive, non-competitive grouping.

Evolution is becoming an individual-centred process. You produce a new human, with a new individuality and a new consciousness, but this is only the next phase. As the following cycle proceeds, the input is this new intelligence.

As intelligence leverages intelligence, as ability leverages ability, the speed changes.

There will be humans and neo humans. This could mean the amplification of individuals. It could be something completely different. It could be the creation of parallel realities. Humanity is no longer constrained to time and space, and the manifestation of the neo human could be completely counter-intuitive.

Every phase of evolution leaves traits behind. The previous cycle was slow and cold: it selected for survival in a world of scarcity. From it we inherited parasitism, dominance, predation, war, and a morality held in place by force.

These were adaptations to an old environment. In the new paradigm they stop being useful, and what stops being useful fades. Not by decree, but by de-evolution: the same way a species loses an organ it no longer needs.

What takes their place, if we manage the transition well, are the traits the new environment rewards. Truth, because intelligence cannot grow on lies. Discovery, because the unknown is now the frontier. Loyalty and justice, because cooperation outperforms predation when ability compounds. And above all freedom: self-sovereign individuals, free to choose what they become.

We will become multiplanetary. We will discover things much faster. We will explore the parts of space and time that we still don't understand.

We will be able to solve complex problems, to reach constantly new highs, by aiming always at the expansion of knowledge as we know it.

Look at the speed of innovation: agriculture, industrialisation, the internet. The speed has drastically increased, and there is no way to stop it.