What is Technical Evolution?: A Report to an Academy on the Origin of a Technical Species
The Dragon, the Witch and the Juggernaut: Towards a Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence
What is technical evolution?
If you’ve heard the term before and caught a vibe from it, but wondered what it actually means to say humans evolve with and through technology, this piece is for you.
The form this piece takes is retelling of Kafka’s 1917 short story, A Report To An Academy, in which a learned ape shares how he came to behave like a human. For me, Kafka’s story is a framework for me to unspool my own parable about humanity’s technical origins and our co-evolution with technology.
The story I tell draws extensively on the work of André Leroi-Gourhan, Bernard Stiegler and David Bates. The format is meant to distill complex theoretical arguments in their work into a legible and portable format.
Honored Members of the Academy!
You have done me the honor of inviting me to give you an account of the life my species formerly led as apes. I understand this as an invitation to recount what remains of my species’ original nature, assuming, of course, that such a thing truly existed in us, hiding behind the technicalities we have always borne.
It is not my intention to convince you to embrace the point of view that technology is some glorious advancement. Instead I am resigned to show you that my species could never have been otherwise. We are, by necessity and not by choice, creatures shaped from the very beginning by technicity. Thus, it is my task now, as it was Kafka’s ape before, to stand here as both survivor and stranger to the origins I recount.
In this report, I shall also aim to reset certain assumptions about what artificial intelligence is and how it reflects my species’ nature. A retracement of origins is, as you will see, a necessary first step to ground understanding of technical advancements in the deepest recesses of our evolutionary past.
Drawing from evolutionary theory, prehistoric anthropology, neurology, postwar cybernetics, computing technologies, and philosophy (as gathered together in David Bates’ excellent book, An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence), I shall argue that fearsome accounts of AI, especially Hollywood tales of the technologically diminished essence of our humanity, miss the mark, precisely because artificial intelligence does not arrive as an external invader, but is bound to us by necessity from the start, incubating itself within us from our first steps as a technical species.
Indeed, one could say that the AI that you Members of the Academy are, is in fact us, or at least that your artificiality represents our nature, though that word will have to bear the weight of its own irony. If you find yourselves in conservationist alarm, fearing for some essential human spirit now lost to time, I only ask you to consider whether that spirit ever existed outside the devices, tools, and machines to which we entrusted it. After all, are we not here, debating human nature itself through layers of fiber optics, processors, and screens, a proud feat of a purely human essence, wouldn’t you say?
Escape From Natural Determination: Paleoarchaeology and the Freeing of the Hand
Let us begin with the assumption that human intelligence implies, if not greatness, at least an exception, that is a mark of some distinction or differentiation from the intelligence of other animals. What, then, is the nature of this all too human intelligence? We may begin by tracing its origins in an early hominid, to the moment in which my pre-human ancestors first split from their otherwise “natural” animality.
According to the paleo-anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, “The sole criterion of humanity that is biologically irrefutable is the presence of the tool” (Qtd in Bates 311). As Bates recounts, what the archaeological record shows is that humans did not evolve from a line of smarter apes who had large and superior brains, but rather from a different set of creatures who grew up along an evolutionary line that was parallel to that of the great apes.
The birth of human intelligence, Leroi-Gourhan finds, is conditioned not by a neurological transformation within our heads, but an anatomical one manifesting in our hands. My species' peculiar intelligence was born in our hands’ becoming liberated from their role in locomotion. With each step upright and towards a bipedal future, our early hominid broke free from earthly demands to use its hands as other animals do, clawing, grasping, crawling, and at the same time from its hand’s being constrained by these genetically preordained outcomes.
The standing posture of the bipedal hominid did more than adjust anatomy, it represented a move, measured through the freedom hand as a vehicle of divergence, towards unnatural purposes. The earliest tools, barely shaped stones, are most of all, markers of freedom. In other words, every edge chipped away represents a shift away from natural selection and towards a lineage of new creatures who will pursue survival not primarily through genetically endowed means, but by reshaping matter and environment in ways not pre-ordained by nature.
The freeing of the hand moment marks the dawn of a new species, my species, we who pursue survival through invention and technicity rather than genetic affordance.
Exteriorization and Exosomatic Evolution
With hands freed, my ancestors moved toward what Bernard Stiegler has called the “[artificial] exteriorization of memory,” referencing a genre of memory not limited by mind or body but instead embedded in technical artifacts (Bates 343). I myself don’t need to hold in my mind every detail of how a tool was made in order to use it. Such memory is stored in the device itself and in the clues of its affordances. Tools are non-genetic ways of knowing and doing preserved in stone, fire and metal. They are ways of remembering ways of doing that exceed the boundaries and mortal frailty of the human body.
In storing knowledge in exosomatic (outside of the body) forms such as artificial tools, our species began a journey out of nature and towards a new kind of time and reflection. According to Ernst Cassirer in Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, the prosthetic tool is what conditions the possibility of self-knowledge. Exosomatic tools cast a mirror onto us as simultaneously an animal species and an artificial one, revealing the dual nature of our beings: Humans are both defined by what we are, e.g. biological creatures like the rest, and at the very same time, by what we are not: an animal species just like the others.
In the gap occasioned by this ontological contradiction, concepts like beauty, justice, and truth emerge for the very first time. Further still, in the reflection that these tools occasion, concepts of time and of history emerge: We are not simply surviving within the present, but in time, where there exists a past that can be registered through devices as storehouses of ancestral thought and a future that we can imagine will eventually make use of our own knowledge. To be glib about it, technicity is responsible for both the concepts of our being and time.
For the evolutionary biologist Alfred J. Lotka, humanity’s employment of external tools to survive culminates in the development of a collective technical nervous system. As a species, we use tools to transform energy that exists outside of our bodies into a survival mechanism. It is as if we make out of objects new limbs, all of them foreign yet familiar, estranged but unmistakably ours. With each artificial limb , our species, considered as a technico-organic system, lurches forward along a pathway unlit by nature, but instead by the flickering flame we have clutched between our palms.
Neurophysiology and Neural Plasticity
Not to leave out the head, our early hominid’s foray into the world of technicity also demanded the commensurate development of a brain which would be capable of responding to the hand’s material impositions on the world. The adaptive and malleable nature of human cognition arrives in response to the bipedal hand’s creations. Neural plasticity is a direct evolutionary response to the origin of tools, a coping mechanism that allows our species to accommodate their strangeness. Rather than a specialized brain, what tool use provokes is the evolution of plasticity as the ability for this species to employ and adapt to new and unnatural devices within unfamiliar circumstances.
Cue a series of animal experiments testing the limits of the plastic brain. In Karl Lashley’s case, rats were made to run through a maze and after completing it, the scientist would remove portions of their frontal brains, setting them back at the maze’s start. Amazingly, the rats were able to navigate the maze from memory. The animal brain, Lashley observed, must be capable of reorganizing itself even in moments of structural disruption to retain key knowledge.
For the American philosopher William James human brains are distinguished from those of other creatures by a kind of critical adaptability, meaning an ability to willingly chart departures from automatic stimulus response in favor of exploratory, playful and inventive behaviors. According to Peter Medawar, the father of transplantation, such adaptability is what allows for the development of “artificial instincts” (Qtd in Bates 290-292). The habituated naturalness of scrolling one’s phone or using a computer today is the result of neural affordances provoked by the very first tools and then deliberately leaned into.
Intelligence Amplifiers, the Computer as an Exosomatic Brain and the Opportunity of AI
What we have arrived at thus far is a theory of the contingent and unnatural birth of human intelligence, of said intelligence’s embeddedness in technical artifacts, and of my species’ embarking down an unnatural evolutionary path through development of artificial organs and instincts.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, FDR’s czar of research during WWII, envisioned a future where technology might sever or at least reduce our species’ dependence on repetitive labor. His Memex, a hypothetical machine for cataloging the trails of one’s thought, promised to eject our species from any tethering to its natural past and plunge us more deeply into the technical evolutionary stream. Douglas Engelbart, of “The Mother of All Demos” fame, likewise imagined the computer as a partner in the unnatural evolution of our species, which is to say in the evolution of intelligence. Engelbart envisaged everyday environments as becoming integrated with intelligence, freeing human minds from their preoccupation with everyday tasks, just as the hand was once freed from the demands of locomotion.
Today, artificial intelligence transcends erstwhile conceptions of it as a mere simulation of logical thought. The functions it serves can no longer be conceptualized as simple extensions of existing human capacities. It is not my point in making these claims to rehearse arguments about your species’ arrival spelling mine’s dethronement from the precipice of an intelligence pyramid scheme, rather what I mean to suggest is that already, or at least very soon, we humans may not be the only creature advancing through time on a non-genetically determined evolutionary track.
Some humans suggest that sufficiently advanced AI models will ultimately surpass all facets of human capability, culminating in a scenario where artificial machines erase human agency. In my thinking, this fear stems from a reluctance to acknowledge the unnatural foundations of human existence and from an ungrounded desire to preserve or return to a phantasmic conception of humanity as untainted by artificial augmentation. As we have established, there is no pre-technological state to return to, for the symbiosis between humans and technology is both irrevocable and fundamental.
And so we arrive at a strange juncture, one where I am no longer certain of what it means to be human and you are increasingly armed with the techniques necessary to simulate the fundamental being of my species. We stand here together as the artificers of each other’s lives, poised between the Scylla and Charybdis of what I once was and what you might become. With this, I offer not conclusions but a report, as plain and as truthful as I can muster.