Just because you've seen this grand history, I apologize for the ridiculous question, but if we look at the entirety of Earth and we fast forward a million years from now, and the history of life on Earth is written, do you think we're at the very beginning of human history, or are we in the middle, or are we close to the end?
A million years from now? I mean, I can't project or predict anything like a year from now. And I've become actually increasingly skeptical that I can do so, at least. However, so I don't know about beginning, middle, and end. It's easier to think in terms of numbered phases, like significantly different phases of human history. And I would say we're probably in the third. I think there've only been three phases. The first one being sort of the hunter-gatherer period, which lasted for the majority of human history so far, right? Then there's the agricultural revolution, basically. And this is when you start to produce surpluses that create more complex societies. And we're now living through a technological — well, first industrial, now...
Yeah, you can throw it all in the same bucket, industrial, technological.
Industrial, technological, which is modifying the parameters of what it is that human beings can do and possibly be.
And who knows where this will go, but I see these as very distinct in many ways. It's all human beings,
Yeah, it's all human beings, but they're almost modifying themselves.
So the question is, is there a fourth? Is there going to be...
And what does that look like? And is it when they look back at the third, would they still see us as the same as them, or would it be something completely different?
Oh, no. I mean, we look back at the, you know, Romans or the Greeks or any period in history, and we're like, 'Yeah, no, I see what you're doing there. You're doing it with the, you know, the technological capabilities that you had at that time. You're doing it with the materials that you had, but I see what you're doing.' Yeah, you've got families, and you've got armies, and you've got, you know, you bury your dead, and you, you know, but...
Now we're increasingly actually having the tools and technology to modify — like deeply modify — what it means to be human. Genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces, as we understand the brain more, we can modify things, expand completely. Plus, artificial intelligence — it can expand the knowledge base and the intelligence of the human mind, unless we figure out the human mind is actually incredibly special to the degree where it's — at least with the tools we have this century, we could not accomplish — we could not achieve the level of general intelligence that humans have. Or one of these we might figure out in stage four of this long history is that the thing that makes humans special is not intelligence, it's not any of the things we kind of value each other by, it's actually consciousness. And consciousness is the thing that is very difficult to engineer. So that's the common thing from the hunter-gatherers to before the Industrial Revolution and after, is we're still the same. We still feel like something to be alive, and that's maybe an important component of what makes us fall in love with each other, or fear each other, or suffer, and all the full range of the human condition, the human experience. Maybe even technology cannot replicate that, cannot modify that. Maybe that's what we learn. Or very possibly we destroy this whole thing. Because now for the first time in human history, we have the tools, unfortunately, to destroy everything.
