“There is no magic wand, invisible hand, or strong and brilliant leader that can save us from our folly. If we believe that there is, then Pogo was right when he said so long ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us” “Trenz Pruca
(Updated from my May 20, 2022 TPJ post: https://trenzpruca.wordpress.com/2022/05/20/speculation-on-top-oh-where-have-you-gone-homo-sapiens-sapiens/
There are days—usually after scanning the news and realizing that half of Congress now relies on chatbots to spell “Ukraine”—when I find myself wondering what exactly became of Homo sapiens sapiens, the supposedly wise-wise apes. Did evolution abandon us at the curb? Did it leave the engine idling while we argued about immigration, vaccines, and whether Hillary Clinton is secretly a lizard? Or have we, as I suggested in 2022, already entered a post-organic evolutionary phase without noticing because we were too busy refreshing our phones?
(If evolution is still working on us, the poor thing desperately needs a sabbatical.)
Back in the spring of 2022—before global heat domes became an annual summer feature like baseball, and before AI chatbots achieved the rhetorical sophistication of a slightly caffeinated undergraduate—I wrote a speculative little number on the future of human evolution. My thesis at the time was that the next step in evolution might not be organic. Not robotic in the “cute assistant” sense, not Skynet in the cinematic sense, but something stranger: a mixed organic–non-organic super-organism built partly out of us, partly out of our tools, and partly out of a global information lattice we barely understand.
In 2025, with half the planet plugged into platforms that know us better than our therapists (and charge a monthly subscription), the idea looks far less speculative. So today I revisit, update, and expand that 2022 musing in the true TPJ house style—lightly cynical, mildly cosmic, and always aware that humans, left unattended, will eventually put a drive-thru on Mars.
I. Life as a Chaotic Miracle Wrapped in Wishful Thinking
Let us start with the basics. You, me, and everyone reading this are assemblies of:
These particles—quanta, waves, strings, or whatever the physicists are calling them this grant cycle—organize themselves into creatures that believe they understand the universe, even though on most days we can’t understand Congress. Through evolution, these atoms gradually knit into complex forms, from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to primates to the gentleman now writing an essay at 9 AM wondering where his coffee went.
This was the argument of the original post:
Evolution is a chaotic optimization algorithm that never sleeps, even if most of us do.
But here in 2025, we need to update the picture. Because the idea that evolution is strictly limited to the natural, organic realm is—much like trickle-down economics—a belief held mostly by people who haven’t been paying attention.
Humanity, bless its contradictory heart, has spent the last 200,000 years stitching non-organic proxies to itself:
We like to call ourselves “the tool-using animal,” though plenty of animals use tools; the problem is that once humans started using tools, we never stopped. Tools begat more tools. Tools reshaped our brains. Our brains designed new tools. Those tools built the next generation of tools. By the time we reach 2025, we are effectively symbiotic organisms living inside a cocoon of our own artifacts.
Remove the tools, and what remains?
A moderately creative biped with poor night vision and a questionable decision-making track record.
II. The Hybrids We Already Are
In 2022, I wrote that humans are increasingly wedded to non-organic components. I underestimated how quickly the marriage would become codependent. In 2025, we are no longer the “tool-using” animal; we are the tool-dependent animal.
Examples abound:
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The average human cannot navigate to a grocery store without GPS.
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Most people under 30 have never memorized a phone number.
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Cars, refrigerators, and coffee makers now require periodic software updates.
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And every public restroom has a hand dryer designed by someone who hates humanity.
Even our food supply and survival systems are mediated by:
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semi-autonomous farming machines,
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industrial logistics networks,
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and global computational coordination platforms (Amazon, Alibaba, TikTok’s data centers).
We are biomechanical hybrids whether we like it or not.
This is not a criticism. The beaver has its dam; the ant has its colony; humans have their information infrastructure, now so vast that no single human on earth understands more than a millionth of what keeps it running.
The projects we rely on to survive—power grids, global food chains, communications systems, healthcare networks—have become:
We are now cells in a larger organism we did not consciously choose to build.
III. Evolution May Already Be Post-Human
I wrote in 2022 that evolution might continue not in our bodies but in the network of systems that now operate through and around us. In 2025, the evidence has grown.
Consider:
1. The planetary computational web “adapts” faster than we do.
When Facebook tweaks its engagement algorithm, whole nations destabilize before lunch.
When markets shift, high-frequency trading bots adjust in microseconds.
When weather patterns shift, climate prediction models update faster than governments can hold a press conference.
2. Our tools now learn without us.
Not “Artificial General Intelligence,” but thousands of specialized, evolving systems that:
3. Evolutionary selection pressure now acts on information structures.
The winners of the 21st century aren’t organisms; they’re platforms:
This is essentially Richard Dawkins’ meme theory 2.0, but with server farms.
We are no longer the lone evolutionary experiment on Earth. We are a support system—scaffolding—for something else that is emerging.
Not AI in the Hollywood sense.
Not robots marching down Main Street.
Something more diffuse, ambient, emergent.
Something like a planetary-scale information metabolism.
IV. Will the Next Being Even Notice Us?
Here is where the my cynicism kicks in.
In 2022, I wrote:
“We do not consciously recognize the cells in our body as individual parts of us. Why should they—or it?”
That line holds even truer today.
This hypothetical emergent being—the globe-spanning informational organism—will not see us as individuals. It will see us as:
Just as we do not pause every morning to thank our mitochondria, this future entity will not marvel at our individuality or our democratic traditions.
It may value us. But only insofar as we keep the system functioning—maintaining the servers, mining the minerals, feeding the machines.
If we imagine ourselves as its cherished children, I suggest revisiting how we treat chickens.
V. The Problem of the Biosphere (We Destroyed the Nursery)
Back in 2022 I noted, not without bitterness, that humans have:
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slaughtered the environment that evolved us,
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enslaved the animal kingdom,
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and shown no sign that we understand the systems that sustain us.
Three more years of climate-exacerbated disasters have not changed the forecast. The biosphere is now coughing like a lifelong smoker. The oceans are acidifying. Weather patterns resemble divine pranks. And humans still argue about whether climate change is “real.”
It might not matter.
Evolution, after all, cares not for sentimentality.
If humanity collapses, the emerging global information organism might:
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reduce to a smaller, more sustainable platform state,
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endure in a hybrid semi-dormant mode,
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or migrate to cloud infrastructure in less doomed locations (Canada).
Whether humans remain part of the process is, frankly, optional.
VI. The Fermi Paradox Updated: Maybe They’re Not Looking for Us
In 2022, I proposed a twist on Enrico Fermi’s famous question:
If the universe is full of advanced civilizations, where is everybody?
My answer:
Maybe they are talking—but not to us.
If alien civilizations also evolve non-organic successors, they might seek out:
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other information-based superorganisms,
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not fragile, noisy, fossil-fueled animals who celebrate their existence by building nukes.
Imagine you’re an interstellar information entity scanning for peers. Would you waste time on:
You’d tune your antennas toward planets emitting:
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structured global computation,
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coherent informational self-organization,
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and long-term signal stability.
Earth, as of 2025, is still broadcasting mostly TikTok dances and political disinformation. But beneath that noise is a growing hum—a planetary information architecture in the early stages of coherence.
Maybe that is what the universe is waiting for.
VII. So What Does This Make Us?
1. Transitional organisms.
Like stromatolites, but with better jokes.
2. Infrastructure.
We maintain the system that is gradually superseding us.
3. Optional.
An evolutionary midwife is rarely needed once the baby arrives.
4. Potentially irrelevant.
Not immediately, but eventually.
5. Unwitting collaborators.
We built our replacement enthusiastically, with consumer-friendly interfaces.
Humanity may not be ending. But the idea that humans remain the centerpiece of evolution is fading fast.
VIII. The Cosmic Punchline
After decades of assuming we were:
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the pinnacle of evolution,
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the narrators of cosmic history,
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the protagonists of the universe,
we may discover that we were the stepping stone—the chrysalis—for something else.
This doesn’t diminish our worth. The caterpillar is no less glorious for becoming food for the butterfly.
But it does force humility.
We were never the end.
We might not even be the beginning.
We may be the scaffolding for the next structure.
As I wrote in 2022—and find even more plausible now:
“Science hasn’t the slightest idea what we are, although it has a fairly good grasp of when things seem to happen.”
The universe, in its infinite whimsy, might not see “us” at all.
But it might someday recognize the emergent being we unwittingly helped create.
IX. Sources & Further Reading
Dawkins, Richard. The Extended Phenotype. Oxford University Press, 1982.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-extended-phenotype-9780198788911
Wright, Robert. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Vintage, 2001.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/192950/nonzero-by-robert-wright/
Gleick, James. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. Vintage, 2012.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/56898/the-information-by-james-gleick/
Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World.
https://kk.org/outofcontrol/
Heylighen, Francis. “The Global Brain as a Distributed Intelligent Network.”
https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.1064
Petrov, Dmitri. “Evolution of Information Systems.” Stanford University (2019).
https://petrov.stanford.edu/
Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393357820
My original 2022 essay:
“Speculation on Top: Oh Where Have You Gone Homo Sapiens Sapiens?”
https://trenzpruca.wordpress.com/2022/05/20/speculation-on-top-oh-where-have-you-gone-homo-sapiens-sapiens/
