Yes, says Jon Turney, author of The Rough Guide to the Future
The best argument for expecting Homo sapiens to become extinct is to state the opposite: human beings will be around for ever. To believe that, you must hold that we will avoid a range of blockbuster catastrophes — asteroid impact, pandemic, gamma-ray burst, maybe even nuclear war. Let’s be optimistic and say that we will. But we will also have to avoid the fate that the fossil record shows awaits the average new species: disappearance, after ten million years or so.
Some hardy types — cockroaches, crocodiles, horseshoe crabs — exceed this by a big margin, staying the same for tens or hundreds of millions of years. Could we match them?
Well, we are exceptional. But we are exceptional in ways that will hasten our departure, not delay it. What makes us different from other species is our invention of culture. That has allowed us to relieve many evolutionary pressures. That might promote our survival. But it will do much more. Culture, in the shape of technology, will allow us to manage our evolution.
To simplify, I’ll assume that what matters here is evolving higher intelligence. Roughly speaking, there are two ways to get there. Tweak our genes, hence our brains, to increase our cognitive capacities. Or build intelligent machines that surpass their creators. (Combinations might work, too.) I find it hard to believe that both will be impossible for much longer, evolutionarily speaking.
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Whichever works, the effect will be the same. It is sensible to call machine intelligence non-human. Realistically, people with appreciably enhanced cognition will be non-human too. Even if we share the vast majority of their DNA, as we now do with chimps, we simply have no idea what Homo super-sapiens may think or do.
Which means that there is no way to guess whether they might have any interest in our welfare. I’m guessing not, but that’s OK. Think of it not as engineering our demise, but fashioning our successors.
No, says Charles Godfray, professor of zoology at the University of Oxford
John Maynard Keynes famously said that in the long run we are all dead, and what is true for individuals is true for species. I agree with Jon that our extinction is inevitable if we look far enough ahead. But forget the far-distant future and concentrate on the next few centuries, the time horizon in which decisions made today can have foreseeable consequences.
In my early 50s, I am more optimistic about humanity’s future than when I was at half my current age. I’m a population biologist and the pessimism of my twenties was a result of what seemed the ineluctable power of human population increase leading to, if not certain extinction, then inevitable famine and pestilence. But what we know now is that human populations, as they develop, can naturally selfregulate. For complex and still not fully understood reasons they go through the “demographic transition” from high to low birth rates. Our best estimates suggest that the global population will plateau somewhere between nine and ten billion by the end of this century.
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To me it is astonishing and hugely encouraging that we can seriously contemplate a world with stable populations and a functioning and biodiverse environment. But for this to happen we must address a multitude of issues, from sustainable development to food security, environmental protection and climate change. There is everything to play for — this is a unique time in history and the decisions the global community makes in the next couple of decades will resonate down the centuries.
So forget tweaking genes to increase intelligence, or cyborgs or super-intelligent machines. Although I am regularly outwitted by my oven, I think this will stay as science fiction for the foreseeable future. Cognitive science has made huge advances in recent times but we still know comparatively little about how the mind works. Our existing intelligence can set us on a safe path to avoiding extinction, but only if we collectively have the will to make tough and difficult decisions in the years ahead.