Future Darwinism- Evolution Mark 2.0

A phase change in the evolutionary process- a second phase of Hyper-evolution appears inevitable.

As human society begins to achieve a deeper and more intimate understanding of the primary evolutionary imperative shaping its destiny, he predicts a new form of evolution will emerge, accelerating the already exponential pace of change to an extreme level- Evolution Mark 2.0.

The process will manifest in response to a deeper understanding by society of the implications of the evolutionary process itself. The resulting amplifying feedback will generate a glimpse of life’s true potential, accelerating the already massive momentum of evolution and resulting in a rate of change that is forecast to reach hyper-exponential levels in the near future.

If human civilisation is considered to be an information processing and learning system, then the major factors governing the rate of uptake of new knowledge are the capacity for integration into society’s institutions and cultural frameworks, together with the urgency or adaptive pressure of human survival needs.

The rapid drying of the forests four million tears ago produced great survival pressure on all species. But early hominids survived because of their cognitive, structural and social capacity to achieve bipedal locomotion, make crude tools and develop hunting and scavenging strategies consistent with a more open grassland environment.
The same imperatives apply to the capacity of modern humans to adapt to today’s major survival challenges such as global warming, ecological disasters, endemic conflict and economic collapse. Meeting these challenges involves active adaptation through problem solving – the heart of the evolutionary process.

Already an awareness of the pervasive and rapidly accelerating power of evolution is beginning to be felt through the enormous scientific, technological and social advances in our civilisation. This insight creates the evolutionary feedback loop- to actively engage evolution in helping meet today’s complex survival challenges. This further accelerates the knowledge discovery process, which in turn would generate further evolutionary insight and application.

A significant additional impetus would therefore be gained from a deeper understanding of the driving role of the evolutionary paradigm- a global awareness of the engine underlying life's progress. This would eventually create an explosive realisation of life’s future potential, as already debated by a number of eminent physicists, cosmologists and philosophers.

Such a state of hyper-evolution would lead inevitably to a more melioristic outcome for life through the acquisition and leverage of almost limitless knowledge and its by-product wisdom. The caveat that should be applied however relates to the resulting speedup of change, which would quickly reach a mind-numbing level.

As this rate increases to the point of incompatibility with the human capacity to absorb it, new social structures and modes of cognitive processing based on artificial intelligence techniques will emerge to help humans cope.

According to David Tow, this is already occurring. Even as the amount of information expands beyond human horizons, we are developing techniques to bring it under control. Like a fractal image, cybernetic life forms and intelligent machines are evolving in the same way as biological life- mutating to become increasingly intelligent. These act as proxies for humans, managing complex processes and roaming cyber-space- searching, filtering and processing data from an already overwhelming pool.

The unknown factor in this scenario is whether the level of hyper-evolution is capable of producing sudden and catastrophic regression. But optimistically, before this could engulf humanity, an adaptive process would kick in. Simulations would be performed allowing the critical threshold to be avoided until further techniques were developed to manage the potential risks.

Hyper-evolution can be expected to become a part of a new global paradigm within the next thirty years- 2040, based on current rates of knowledge growth and coinciding with the evolution of the super-intelligent Web 4.0. This will rapidly transform all aspects of our culture and civilisation, including accelerating acceptance of the global entity of meta-life, combining biological and artificial forms.

Also implicit in the notion of Evolution Mark 2.0 is the capacity of life to extract itself from the day-to-day pressure of a treadmill existence, finally becoming aware of its glittering potential- forever co-dependent on the evolutionary process.

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