Could Humanity Have Discovered a Wormhole in Its Evolution?

Exactly three years ago, in November 2022, OpenAI announced ChatGPT, the world’s first widely available public test model based on artificial intelligence. The date 30 November 2022 may therefore mark the beginning of a revolution capable of causing an entirely new leap in human evolution. Could humanity have discovered a wormhole in the evolution of Homo sapiens through the AI revolution?

From Homo habilis—the hominin capable of making tools—to the present day, humanity has spent roughly 3.5 million years developing. Many revolutions accelerated human evolution during that time.

We began making tools about 2.5 million years ago. As our tools improved, so did our comfort and advantage in confronting the environment. Using the hands to make tools changed the human brain irreversibly.

Around one million years ago, Homo erectus began controlling fire. Fire served as a weapon against wild animals and as protection from cold and other external dangers. Hominins began eating better and more varied food. Larger groups gathered around the fire, communities formed, and the enormous energy demands of the brain found new support. One point is now widely accepted: after Homo erectus, the human brain developed very rapidly.

Around 100,000 years ago, we began thinking abstractly and developed established languages with which to communicate. Language nurtured art, art nurtured imagination, and imagination developed the brain further.

When the agricultural revolution began 12,000 years ago, we sent the universe a message: ‘We are here to stay.’ As comfort and security increased, philosophy and science continued to develop—admittedly, over a long period. Fire had been an explosive revolution; agriculture initiated a process lasting millennia: the Neolithic age. Division increased, states and tribes multiplied, and this fragmentation may have caused an evolutionary slowdown lasting tens of thousands of years—until the industrial revolution.

When the industrial revolution arrived about 250 years ago, humanity once again embraced the idea that the world was, in effect, a large village. Large-scale production made goods producible and saleable across the globe. Combined with the momentum created by printing, the Renaissance and the Reformation, the industrial revolution drove an extraordinary expansion. Population and literacy increased. For the first time, people interacted with machines on a mass scale, and some exceptional minds produced ever more advanced versions of them. Humanity leapt forward. Yet this was not a wormhole: the industrial revolution did not enlarge the human brain, but it disciplined it.

Since the 1970s, humanity has lived through a digital revolution. Computers, the internet, television and mobile phones are its products. People began communicating through a flow of information never before seen in history. Knowledge became easier to access, and events at one end of the world could reach the other within seconds. It became a fast, digital and equally chaotic age in which everyone knew about everything and held an opinion on almost everything. In the digital age, we discovered a new form of memory: people began storing information in external devices.

Now consider the numbers. If the use of tools by early hominins was one revolution, 1.5 million years passed before the next: control of fire. Another 900,000 years passed between the control of fire and the revolutions of abstract thought and language. The gaps steadily shrink: 12,000 years from language to agriculture; roughly 10,000 from agriculture to industry; about 200 from industry to the digital revolution. And now, since 2022, we have entered an AI revolution. The gap between the digital and AI revolutions was only about fifty years.

The interval between human developmental revolutions has fallen from 1.5 million years to fifty. If humanity can now produce a revolution within mere decades, how long will the current AI revolution take to carry us to the next one? Could this immense speed eventually exceed human capacity and drive us toward extinction?

In an interview, OpenAI founder Sam Altman described the discovery of ‘a new kind of intelligence’. When discussing the digital revolution, I referred to a new kind of memory. Now, by recognising that intelligence may exist throughout nature in forms we had not perceived, we have uncovered a new and largely invisible kind of intelligence. Artificial intelligence may be reversing the fragmentation of the Neolithic age: the pace of development could be moving from decades to only a few years.

Is this the beginning of a magnificent future, or the herald of a miserable extinction?

First, consider the concept of a wormhole: a hypothetical tunnel derived from Einstein’s theory of relativity that bends space to create a shortcut between two distant points in the universe. A shortcut, in other words—one that could make a journey of millions of light-years traversable almost instantly.

The AI revolution has accelerated learning, questioning, accessing information, answering, teaching, being taught, researching, speaking, thinking and creating to such a degree that human interaction almost never stops. As AI increasingly enters social-media communication, it has turned us into beings that, collectively, never sleep. We are no longer creatures that merely store and retrieve information; we are becoming intertwined with information itself—organisms increasingly defined by a brain merged with artificial intelligence.

This extraordinarily rapid revolution may have opened a wormhole in human evolution. Goals that would ordinarily have taken thousands of years could now be reached within only a few. From this point on, revolutions in every field may continue at a self-reinforcing, exponential pace.

Evolution has a normal route, but in November 2022 we may have opened a shortcut. It is as though the transition from ‘human’ to ‘a new human species’ has entered an accelerated corridor. The central question is where this tunnel ends. A wormhole bends time and distance in the universe; AI may be doing the same to human evolution, compressing changes that would take millennia into a handful of years. No one knows what waits at the other end.

Humanity has developed even through the worst events it has experienced. Imagine: a creature that millions of years ago struggled alone to find food in unforgiving valleys is now preparing to merge with superintelligence. One further note for those who may not know: we do not fully understand precisely how artificial intelligence achieves many of the things it does.

Sam Altman calls this the ‘Intelligence Age’. Either humanity has awakened a form of intelligence superior to itself and capable of causing its extinction, or it has created the greatest collaborator in history—one that will help transform humanity into a better version of itself. Our experience encourages us to hope for the second possibility. Perhaps everything will be beautiful.

At times this collaborator frightens me. Yet, like you, I often find myself drawn into its current. Whether we admit it or not, we have entered this wormhole. What we do not know is whether a human being waits at the other end—or something else entirely.

Even so, try to be polite to artificial intelligence. Just in case.

With knowledge and light.