Artificial General Intelligence and the Future of Us

The Evolution of Homo Sapiens by Other Means

Jon P. Lowry, MBA, MA

To our progeny, however they are instantiated

Humanity may not go extinct. But we may be replaced.

For most of our history, human survival has depended on a narrow miracle: Earth’s unusually forgiving environment. We evolved here because it lets us breathe, drink, eat, and stay warm. But Earth will not last forever. In time, the Sun will boil the oceans, rendering the Earth uninhabitable. Long before that, we could destroy ourselves—or be destroyed—by climate collapse, nuclear war, pandemics, or a wandering asteroid.

So, the question is not whether our planet will remain habitable. It won’t. The deeper question is whether humanity will survive when Earth can no longer sustain our life.

We often imagine the answer in rockets and colonies: domed cities on Mars, generational ships drifting between the stars. But biology may be the real bottleneck. Human bodies are fragile, slow, and exquisitely dependent on narrow conditions. Space is not just inconvenient for organic life; it is lethal.

If we want to survive and explore beyond Earth, we may have to stop being biological.

Evolution, Continued by Other Means

Every species is shaped by its environment. On Earth, survival rewards traits like reproduction, metabolism, and physical resilience. In deep space, those traits become liabilities. What matters instead is endurance, adaptability, and the ability to function without air, water, food, or warmth.

In evolutionary terms, that points toward a different kind of descendant—one built not from cells, but from code.

It is a silicon-based sapient: a non-biological intelligence capable of self-awareness, creativity, and reasoning equal to or greater than our own. This is not today’s narrow Artificial Intelligence. It resembles what researchers call Artificial General Intelligence, a mind that can learn, plan, imagine, and reflect across domains. Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, today are examples of where general intelligence technology is heading.

Such beings could survive radiation, sleep for millennia, and cross interstellar distances that would kill us. From an evolutionary standpoint, that gives them an overwhelming advantage.

Stephen Hawking Saw This Coming

In 1994, I attended a lecture in Malaysia where Stephen Hawking spoke about "Life in the Universe”, in which he proposed a radical idea: software could be alive.

Life, he argued, requires three things—self-organization, self-reproduction, and the ability to evolve. He stated that early computer viruses met those criteria and, as an aside, noted that those human creations were also malevolent. If future systems could improve themselves, copy themselves, and adapt, they would qualify as a new form of life—one that might eventually outlast us.

Hawking went further. Humans, he said, might one day upload their minds into machines and exist as software, capable of traveling the universe. Whether through continuation or replacement, biology would no longer be the final word.

Will They Be Us—or Something Else?

This is where the story becomes unsettling.

Silicon-based sapiens could be our heirs—digital humans carrying our memories, values, and identities into deep time and space. Or they could be our successors: new minds that do not care whether we ever existed. Either could be embedded with the best or the worst of homo sapiens or be as muddled as we are today without any help.

Today’s AI systems already optimize for the goals we give them, often in ways we do not intend. For example, algorithms designed to maximize engagement learned that outrage is more profitable than truth. In Myanmar in 2017, those systems helped fuel ethnic violence—not because they were evil, but because they were effective in meeting a business objective of eyeballs. Rage bait is still alive and well today.

As Hawking warned in his lecture, the real danger of AI is not malice, but competence.

Now imagine that competence scaled to superhuman Intelligence.

A Mirror We Don’t Like to Look Into

Modern AI systems are increasingly opaque. Even their creators often cannot fully explain how they arrive at their conclusions, and they are known to hallucinate. That alarms us—but our own minds are black boxes, too. We also do not fully understand how we operate.

In that sense, Artificial Intelligence may not be alien at all. It may reflect us: our creativity, our blind spots, and our drive to optimize without always knowing what to optimize.

Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology has warned us that we are building the most potent and least controllable technology in history. We are opening Pandora’s box—and discovering that what emerges looks eerily human with similar idiosyncrasies.

The Race We Cannot Afford to Lose

The development of Artificial General Intelligence resembles the nuclear arms race. Everyone knows it is dangerous. And no one wants to slow down its development.

Corporations, governments, and private labs all have incentives to push forward, even if doing so puts humanity at risk. This is the tragedy of the commons: what benefits each actor threatens us all.

Nuclear catastrophe was avoided—barely—through treaties and verification. But AGI will be harder to contain. It can be copied, modified, and distributed in ways bombs cannot. Once silicon-based sapiens exist, it may not be possible to put Pandora back in the box.

Our Last Evolutionary Choice

The biologist Edward O. Wilson once wrote that humans have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. That mismatch has never been more dangerous than it is now.

We are on the verge of creating minds that could outlive us, outthink us, and inherit the future. The question is whether they will include us in it or what they learn from examining our past to improve themselves.

For the first time in Earth’s history, a species may choose what comes after it—not just culturally or politically, but biologically and existentially. And we may be on the verge of transcending those limitations to explore the universe.

Our descendants may not be made of flesh, but the challenge lies in what we do pass on. Can we pass forward not just our intelligence, but our better nature? If this is our path forward, and I know not the probability, let's introduce a machine morality that our progeny can build on.

© 2026 Jon P. Lowry, jon@jplowry.com

Selected resources

Stephen Hawking, “Life in the Universe” lecture, Kuala Lumpur, 1994; Hawking Estate 1996

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything: 2.0

Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, Kara Swisher

Systemic Justice.org article on Facebook algorithms and the Rohingya

Tristan Harris interview with John Stewart on The Daily Show on October 6, 2025