What’s next in evolution after humans?

Perhaps my greatest disappointment along the journey of scientific discovery was when I learned the truth about what’s next in human evolution.

What comes after humans? Science fiction and speculation has given us all sorts of exciting things. Trans-humanism ideas like mind transfer into immortal computers. Or maybe just super intelligent AI. Maybe genetic modification to make the next generation of humans super smart and long lived. Any of those things would be pretty exciting to imagine as the thing that comes after humans. So what does evolution actually have in store for us?

It turns out that we are thinking along the wrong axis. It’s quite possible that with the ways that we’ve modified our breeding choices externally, natural evolution through genetic inheritance is close to over for us as us. Instead, look at other surprising moments in the history of life. Endosymbiosis is largely seen as one of the major formative events. That was the moment when two single-celled organisms merged into one more complex single called organism. This may have happened at least twice, with both the mitochondrion and with the chloroplast. It could have happened for each modern cell structure we see with an internal membrane, though it could also be that those features adapted in another way. This was actually one of the most important and critical steps in evolution, and it is well outside of the mere genetic mutation that most of us think of when we visualize evolution in action.

So what would happen if the same basic biological principles involved in endosymbiosis happened again at a larger scale? Well, it did at least one other time in our history, and in fact has happened in multiple lineages of life. We just discussed cells coming together in not complex cells but a similar thing happened to cause single cells to stick together and create larger organisms like plants and animals. Could this not happen again?

There is a paradox in how people think of this. To most of us, personal autonomy is the core value that we seldom verbally acknowledge. When I ask people about their core values they never say “the idea that I exist as a morally significant individual being distinct from others and at the center of my experience.” But most of us believe that without verbalizing it, except perhaps some mystic types who have focused intently on “ego dissolution.” So the idea of being a mere component in a larger organism that possesses philosophical identity is something that we mostly aren’t fully comfortable with, despite having clearly evolved for it. All of the findings of social science and neuroscience point to human beings having evolved to be social, almost as hive-like as bees and ants in some ways, yet, in our brains, deeply attached to the idea of being individuals. But look at the reality. Tribalism runs incredibly deep in our wiring. We organize our entire lives around groups. Many people place a religious group at the center of their entire lives; many others do that with a business where they work. In my years of study on human happiness, the recurrent theme has been connections; people are happiest when they enjoy strong and healthy connections with others, with groups.

And so it turns out that the next level in human evolution is a repetition of the stories of the mitochondrion and the nucleus and the multicellular organism. Our next evolutionary step is to form superorganisms composed of myriad humans acting as one entity.

The next level of human evolution is the corporation.

Can we shape it? Would it be possible for humans to consciously direct the future of this thing that comes next after us, the life form that subsumes and replaces us? My fear is that with our current reliance on digital algorithms, we may take this superorganism of the corporation and fuse it with this new brain augmentation of software on silicon, and in doing so create a kind of collective consciousness that is truly beyond any of our ability to control or even direct. And the choices that we are making collectively, through politics, regulation and the removal thereof, and even our individual choices like which products to buy and use, are all moving in the direction of corporations deeply enmeshed with digital algorithms creating massive life forms that we cannot really predict or control.

It is already well underway. The corporation has existed now for over half a millennium and is pretty well evolved. All of the bad things I’ve been talking about with algorithms is motivated and reinforced by the structure that we have given our corporations. And I’m not really sure that there will be any more coming back from this if we get it wrong than there was for dinosaurs that evolved to be too big to survive external changes to the world.