Summary: Artificial intelligence is becoming a pivotal force in human lives, prompting questions about its evolutionary effects. A new study explores how AI may influence human evolution through everyday interactions, likening human-AI dynamics to ecological relationships such as predation or competition.
Potential evolutionary shifts include changes in brain size, attention spans, personality traits, and social behaviors, particularly through AI’s impact on relationships and decision-making.
While the immediate cultural and psychological effects are significant, the study predicts gradual genetic impacts, though forecasting such evolution remains highly uncertain. This nuanced exploration underscores the profound yet unpredictable role AI could play in shaping humanity’s future.
Key Facts:
- Human-AI interactions may mimic ecological relationships, influencing evolution.
- Evolutionary shifts could include changes in brain size, attention spans, and personality.
- The study emphasizes cultural impacts may outweigh genetic effects in the near term.
Source: University of Chicago Press Journals
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more common and sophisticated, its effects on human lives and societies raises new questions.
A new paper published in The Quarterly Review of Biology posits how these new technologies might affect human evolution. In “How Might Artificial Intelligence Influence Human Evolution?” author Rob Brooks considers the inevitable but incremental evolutionary consequences of AI’s everyday use and human-AI interactions—without “dramatic but perhaps unlikely events, including possibilities of human annihilation, assimilation, or enslavement.”
In the paper, Brooks considers (“often with considerable speculation”) some possible forms of human-AI interaction and the evolutionary implications of such interactions via natural selection, including forms of selection that resemble the inadvertent and deliberate selection that occurred when humans domesticated crops, livestock, and companion animals.
He argues that technologies that deploy AI interact with humans and affect their lives in ways that can be understood by considering the kinds of biotic relationships between individuals of different species such as predators and prey, hosts and parasites, and biological competitors.
“The ways such interspecies interactions have shaped animal evolution, including human evolution, can provide some basis for predicting how AI might influence human evolution in the future,” he notes.
Human-AI interactions can resemble human-human social interactions, with computers, and especially AI-driven technologies, becoming increasingly important social actors. It is in these interactions that much of the potential for AI to influence human evolution lies.
Through that lens, Brooks’ review examines AI’s possible effects on matchmaking (such as dating apps), intimacy, virtual friendships, and the criminal justice system.
He extracts several predictions, including the acceleration of recent evolutionary trends toward smaller brains, selection on attention spans, personality types, and mood-disorder susceptibilities.
He also hypothesizes changes in intimacy-building and mating competition due to AI applications may influence the evolution of social behavior.
Brooks concludes that the cumulative effects of human-AI interactions on human differential reproduction and, thereby, gene frequencies and patterns of inheritance, are likely to be small relative to the immediate effects of those interactions on individual lives, well-being and happiness, and the effects on cultural evolution, keeping in mind that predicting how AI might change humanity is difficult and prone to error.
“The direction and rate of evolution can be hard to predict even for organisms kept under controlled conditions,” he writes.
“Far more so the complexities of predicting selection and resulting evolution of humans in a fast-moving AI-rich world.”
About this AI research news
Author: Griffin Reed
Source: University of Chicago Press Journals
Contact: Griffin Reed – University of Chicago Press Journals
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“How Might Artificial Intelligence Influence Human Evolution?” by Rob Brooks. Quarterly Review of Biology
Abstract
How Might Artificial Intelligence Influence Human Evolution?
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more common and sophisticated, its effects on human lives and societies are attracting considerable attention. The question of how these new technologies might affect human evolution remains far less often asked, and most attempts focus on dramatic but perhaps unlikely events, including possibilities of human annihilation, assimilation, or enslavement.
This article considers instead the inevitable but incremental evolutionary consequences of AI’s everyday use and human-AI interactions. I consider some possible forms of human-AI interaction, and the evolutionary implications of such interactions via natural selection, including forms of selection that resemble the inadvertent and deliberate selection that occur during domestication. The direction and rate of evolution can be hard to predict even for organisms kept under controlled conditions.
Far more so the complexities of predicting selection and resulting evolution of humans in a fast-moving AI-rich world. Nonetheless, I extract several predictions, including the acceleration of recent trends toward smaller brains, selection on attention spans, personality types, and mood-disorder susceptibilities.
Further, changes in intimacy-building and mating competition due to AI applications that act as friends and intimates are likely already affecting mating success and may influence the evolution of social behavior.
