III. What If Humans Can Evolve Too?

            III. What If Humans Can Evolve Too?




If the main danger lies not only in the potentially excessive growth of artificial intelligence, but also in the stagnation of human development, another question emerges:

Can human beings evolve alongside the intelligence they have created?

Until now, we have almost always framed the problem as a competition.

Human beings versus machines.

But perhaps that way of posing the question is already outdated.

No one asks a human being to dig the ground faster than an excavator. No one considers it a defeat that a calculator multiplies numbers faster than we do. Human beings have always created tools precisely in order to overcome their own physical and intellectual limitations.

Writing expanded human memory.

Books allowed one generation to speak to another across centuries.

The microscope made visible what the human eye could never have seen.

The telescope extended the human gaze to the scale of the universe.

So why should artificial intelligence necessarily be seen only as a competitor?

Perhaps one possible future is not the replacement of human intelligence, but its extension.

Brain-computer interfaces already exist that can capture signals from the brain and translate them into commands for external devices. Most of this work is still focused on restoring lost functions — movement, communication, control of prostheses. But research is also emerging in which AI acts as a kind of “copilot” for neuro-computer interfaces. We are still very far from the enhanced human of science fiction. But the possibility of direct interaction between a biological brain and a computing system is no longer pure fiction.

This leads to a very simple question:

What would happen if, one day, AI became not merely an external tool for human beings, but a permanent component of their intellectual environment?

That could mean very different things.

An extension of memory.

Assistance in analysing information.

Personalised learning systems.

Continuous translation between languages.

Support for scientific or creative work.

And perhaps, one day, new forms of direct interaction with the nervous system.

But I would like to pause here over one common misconception.

We should not return to the old myth that human beings supposedly use only ten percent of their brains, while the remaining ninety percent sleep somewhere, waiting for us to find the button that will finally activate them.

Modern neuroscience does not support that picture.

But reality may be more interesting.

The brain has the ability to reorganise some of its functions. After severe brain injuries, and even after surgical removal of one hemisphere in some cases, remaining structures can partially redistribute functions and establish new functional connections. This obviously does not mean that the brain has unlimited reserves: recovery depends on age, the nature of the injury and many other factors. But the ability of a biological system to reorganise itself remains one of its most remarkable properties.

So perhaps the question should be asked differently.

Not:

“How do we activate ninety percent of the brain?”

But:

“How far can the human brain’s ability to learn, reorganise itself and create new modes of functioning actually go?”

We do not yet know the answer.

And that ignorance may be not a weakness, but an invitation to research.

I remember a boy I met in childhood at the home of some acquaintances. He was younger than I was and, in a way that seemed incredible to me at the time, he could multiply large numbers mentally — numbers that I sometimes did not even have time to remember while they were being spoken.

Later, I saw people on television who could extract square roots from enormous numbers in their heads or perform other calculations that seemed almost impossible.

I do not know exactly what was happening in their brains, or to what extent these abilities depended on innate characteristics, training or other factors.

But the simple fact is thought-provoking.

We are still far from knowing the full diversity of human intellectual abilities.

And perhaps the task of education in the future will not be only to transmit knowledge that is already known, but also to learn much better how to reveal each human being’s individual abilities to think, learn and create.

This is where education meets AI.

The machine does not replace the school.

And the school does not try to turn human beings into poor copies of machines.

On the contrary.

AI could become one of the tools through which we explore human intelligence itself.

We can use it to create more individualised learning environments, to analyse complex patterns of learning, and to investigate new ways of interacting with information.

And suddenly, the technological challenge becomes a question addressed to Homo sapiens:

How well do we actually know how to develop the intelligence nature has given us?

But here another, stranger story begins.

So far, we have been talking about human beings enhanced by machines.

What if the next step were different?

What if, one day, artificial intelligence helped us not only use the human brain we already have, but also understand the very principle of biological information processing more deeply?

In recent years, a field known as organoid intelligence has explored neural organoids as possible biological substrates for computation. Researchers have already developed experimental systems in which cultured neural tissue interacts with electronic interfaces and participates in computational tasks.

This is still a very early field.

We have not created a new brain.

We have not created a new intelligent form of life.

We are still very far from understanding how to build a biological system with the full complexity of human intelligence that could exist autonomously in the world.

But this direction already shows something important:

biological tissue can be considered not only as an object of medicine, but also as a possible medium for information processing.

And a new question appears.

Why should the next form of intelligence necessarily be organised like ours?

This brings me back to the octopus.

The octopus is fascinating. Its nervous organisation is very different from ours. A large proportion of its nervous system is distributed throughout its arms, and recent research reveals a complex, segmented organisation of neural circuits within those limbs themselves.

And an almost childish question suddenly becomes serious:

Why do we assume that intelligence must necessarily resemble a human being?

We are accustomed to imagining intelligence as something located inside a head.

But nature is already showing us other solutions.

Why must there necessarily be one central system?

Why must functions be distributed in a human way?

Why must interaction with the world follow a human model?

The octopus is not evidence of any form of intellectual “superiority.” And we obviously do not know what would have happened if it had lived much longer or possessed a system comparable to ours for transmitting experience.

But it shows us something essential:

nature has already produced more than one architecture of intelligence.

That means the space of what is possible may be far wider than the human form of mind alone.

And here appears the most distant — and perhaps most unsettling — thought in this part.

We are accustomed to fearing that artificial intelligence may one day create a new form of intelligence.

But perhaps the question should be posed differently.

What if human beings, with the help of artificial intelligence, one day learn to create new biological or bio-hybrid architectures for information processing?

Today, these fields are still at a very early stage. Researchers are studying neural organoids, bioelectronic interfaces, bio-hybrid systems, and different ways of connecting biological tissue with computational architectures.

We are nowhere near a new autonomous mind.

But this is already a new question.

If human beings one day learn to create new substrates for intelligence, why should we assume that every one of them must necessarily remain human?

Two very different directions might then appear.

The first:

we use artificial intelligence to understand ourselves better, develop education, reveal human abilities, expand individual possibilities, and help human beings become more complex, more free and more creative.

The second:

we use artificial intelligence to create forms of intelligence that no longer depend on human architecture, the human body or the human way of existing.

The second path remains hypothetical today.

But that is precisely why it deserves to be considered before these possibilities cease to be hypothetical.

Because, for the first time in history, human beings may be approaching the point where they can intervene not only in the tools of intelligence, but — at least in principle — in the very architecture of its biological substrate.

And our entire reflection on human beings and artificial intelligence changes dimension.

At first, we asked:

Can AI become dangerous?

Then:

Could human beings become a “suitcase without a handle” if they stop developing?

Now the question becomes deeper:

What do we want to do with our own intelligence — and what do we want the very concept of intelligence to become?

Several directions are possible.

We can abandon development and gradually transfer more and more of our intellectual work to machines.

We can use AI as a tool for our own development — as an extension of education, culture, science and human creativity.

And one day, perhaps, we may face the possibility of creating entirely new forms of biological or bio-hybrid intelligence.

Then the question will no longer simply be who wins.

The word “victory” itself may no longer be the right word.

It will be a question of direction.

What kind of human being do we want to develop?

Which abilities?

What culture?

What responsibility?

And perhaps also: what new forms of intelligence are we prepared to bring into the world?

We are therefore far from having finished this reflection.

Because the question of today may already be somewhat different from the question of yesterday.

It is no longer only a matter of asking whether we are capable of creating an intelligence that will surpass us. It is also a matter of asking what we intend to do with the world that may emerge when several forms of intelligence begin to coexist — and what place human beings will still choose to occupy within it.

Perhaps that is where the real question begins.