i-Sapiens

That’s going to be the next species. From Homo Sapiens, humans will evolve into a new species called “i-Sapiens”.

i-Sapien will look like this:

But, i must say this shape may change, owing to a combination of Darwinian principles (‘On the Origin of Species’ is a good reading!), a genetic drift or all of that post Darwinian derivatives not on natural selection, but genetic mutations owing to unforeseen changes around us. So, more than natural selection, the changes in the “form factor” here is more to do with the impact of technology on human mind and body.

i-Sapiens will have an unfathomable degree of wisdom. Experiential, hence indescribable at this time. What can be reasonably predicted is this. The current sensorial organs of humans will become redundant, owing to organs enabling perception becoming mostly irrelevant for cognitive processes to output ‘practically reasoned’ commands. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will make every single gadget autonomous and in communication with every other gadget making a neural network of intelligent devices all around us. They will communicate real-time, and coordinate and execute functions without human command. With that, there will be a significant reduction in the current human necessity to spend practical intelligence to operate in daily life.

That’s post Singularity! Times after Singularity is not just ‘Near-ed’, but has happened!. And it is post actualization of Ray Kurzweil’s hypothesis that accelerating progress in technologies will cause a runaway effect and one day Artificial Intelligence will exceed human intellectual capacity and control, thus radically changing civilization, which he calls ‘Technological Singularity’. Imagine a Post Singularity World!

What impact Singularity will have on human mind and body? When humans wouldn’t need to use practical reasoning. A world full of intelligent gadgets that constantly talk to each other, in real time, and decide for us. A phone that receives a message, and asks the washing machine to turn on and wash clothes, a robot picking and choosing the clothes to wash, a cloth hanger that alerts when then cloths are all dried, an electric clothes iron that is autonomous, a microwave that preheats your food of choice – a combination of robotics, intelligent devices, automation and all of that collectively out-smarting the compute power of humans. Overtime, a world in which human commands get limited to matters of “pure reasoning”. A world in which gadgets will tell us how to live our lives. Sitting in a train to Stockholm this afternoon as i key this in, I thought in a post singularity world, human thoughts may get described and transmitted to the recipients of choice in ways which we cannot currently imagine.

This thread is triggered by Sriram while on a drive from Connecticut to Boston last month. Steve Schott was driving a stupid country van that Sandeep had rented from LaGuardia airport. Probably Hertz would have paid him 10 dollars a day to take that car away from their garage. Sriram was sitting at the back reading something on his iPad. (By the way I checked, Apple hasn’t ‘trademark-ed’ i-Sapiens. I thought of asking Manisha to get it registered in my name. But she will charge me the kind of money with which I can buy the Trump Tower). Suddenly, Sriram asked, ‘hey Manoj have you read Singularity Is Near’. Sheer luck i had read it. Otherwise my new funding would have gone for a ‘Sixer’, over the stadium – even with that India may not win the world-cup! Sriram in his inimitable style re-articulated, first Moore’s Law (if I say it just says the number of transistors keep doubling every year, I don’t think it is over simplification!) and then the concept of Singularity. As he ended, I kept thinking what will be the impact of the abundance of Artificial Intelligence on human body and mind, and that’s when I discovered the ‘theory of i-Sapiens’. Wow!

Let me explain to you, the features of the new species:

The little tentacle is ‘C3’. A ‘composite, command and control’ center where all the communications, both input and output to the external world happens. In a world in which Artificial Intelligence is ahead of Human Intelligence, the un-spent intellect and emotional energy will get channelized to expand higher realms of wisdom, making the species unimaginably intuitive. Sri Aurobindo famously believed that humans are in transition, towards a world of intuitive knowledge.

The opening on top is for energy intake. Solid/liquid food, in whatever form available, and needed at that time. The other opening is for excretion and procreation. These are areas for University Students to do research on! The organ for mobility will have an altogether new shape owing to a post wheel world!

And, there goes: i-Sapiens.