Techno Impacts on Evolution

Jerry Mander: “Where evolution once described an interaction between humans and nature, evolution now takes place between humans and human artifacts. We coevolve with the environment we have created; we coevolve with our machines, with ourselves. It’s a kind of in-breeding that confirms that nature is irrelevant to us.” (p.65) “French philosopher and technology critic Jacques Ellul makes it one of his central points that evaluations of technology must not be confined to the machines themselves. Equally important, he says, is to grasp that in technological society, the structure of all of human life and its systems of organization reflect the logic of the machine. All are encompassed by Ellul within the single term technique, which suggests that in contemporary society, human behavior, human thought, and human political and economic structures are part of a seamless fabric inseparable from machines. Technique is machine logic extended to all human endeavors.” (p.120) In The Absence of The Sacred (1991)

Henry Kissinger: “AI [artificial intelligence] may soon be able to optimize situations in ways that are at least marginally different, and probably significantly different, from how humans would optimize them. But at that point, will AI be able to explain, in a way that humans can understand, why its actions are optimal? Or will AI’s decision making surpass the explanatory powers of human language and reason? Through all human history, civilizations have created ways to explain the world around them—in the Middle Ages, religion; in the Enlightenment, reason; in the 19th century, history; in the 20th century, ideology. The most difficult yet important question about the world into which we are headed is this: What will become of human consciousness if its own explanatory power is surpassed by AI, and societies are no longer able to interpret the world they inhabit in terms that are meaningful to them? How is consciousness to be defined in a world of machines that reduce human experience to mathematical data, interpreted by their own memories?” How the Enlightenment Ends (2018)