Homo Sapiens Will End in Musk’s AI Age, and Homo Conspirans Will Begin: The Next Stage of Human Evolution

Part 1 of 27 in Homo Conspirans: The Humans Who Come After Us

Homo Conspirans · Musk’s dream: “expand the scope of consciousness” → the humans who come after Sapiens

The day every one of Elon Musk’s dreams comes true, the age of Homo sapiens ends. Evolution that once needed thousands of years to reshape a single bone will run its course in one or two generations, driven by AI, rockets and robots, and the humans standing at the end of it will carry a different name from ours.

The Bajau have lived on the sea off Sulawesi, Indonesia, for at least a thousand years, in wooden houses on stilts above the water. They spend close to 60 percent of their working day underwater, diving tens of meters on a single breath to spear fish and octopus. In April 2018, a team from the University of Copenhagen reported in the journal Cell that Bajau spleens are about 50 percent larger than those of a neighboring land-dwelling people. Bajau who never dive have the bigger spleen too. It is not training. It is genes.[1] When you hold your breath, the spleen squeezes itself and pushes oxygen-loaded red blood cells into the bloodstream. A big spleen is an oxygen tank built into the body.

The change is not limited to the sea. In 2020, researchers at Flinders University in Australia studied the median artery, a vessel that runs down the middle of the forearm. It feeds the hand while we are in the womb and usually disappears before birth. About 10 percent of people born in the mid-1880s kept it into adulthood. Among people born in the late 20th century, the figure was about 30 percent.[2] That is a tripling in just over a hundred years. Humans are still evolving, and faster than most people assume.

Musk’s companies are rewriting the environment that drives evolution

Environment decides evolution. The sea selected for big spleens. Dairy farming selected for adults who can digest milk: about 7,500 years ago in central Europe, among people who had started milking cattle, a gene that keeps lactose digestion switched on into adulthood spread fast.[3] A culture humans built picked the genes humans carry.

Musk’s companies are trying to replace that environment wholesale. In an April 2022 TED interview, he described what drives him: “We need to expand the scope and scale of consciousness to better understand the nature of the universe.” Consciousness, which took 4.5 billion years to appear, is “a tiny candle in a vast darkness,” he said, and it could go out. In the same conversation he laid out his companies’ goals one by one. A million people on Mars within 20 years. A world where robots do the work and every good and service is available to anyone who wants it. A Neuralink that ends as a high-bandwidth interface enabling “symbiosis between AI and humans.”[4]

Mars changes gravity and air. Robots change work and hunger. Brain chips change the channel thought travels through. What the sea did over a thousand years, these technologies do within one generation. And this time nobody waits for genes to catch up. Technology rebuilds the body and the brain first.

Also read: A Firm With Zero Investors Says It Will Buy TWICE's Agency

Humans who breathe together: Homo conspirans

The name of that transformed humanity is Homo conspirans. The Latin conspirare means “to breathe together.” The same root gave English the word conspiracy.[5]

Homo sapiens, “the wise human,” was a name built around a single head thinking on its own. The next humanity is measured by something else: a crowd that thinks in one rhythm, connected to AI and, through AI, to each other. A question that forms in one person’s mind is answered at once by billions of memories. A scene one person sees is seen in the same moment by family on the other side of the world. People who breathe together like that will always look, from the outside, as if they are conspiring.

The ones who walk away

Not everyone will breathe together. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” the happiness of a city where every citizen is content rests on the suffering of one child locked in a basement. Most citizens know and stay. A few leave the city without a word.[6] The age of connection will have its walkers too. Those who refuse the link will form a people of their own, and in time the connected and the unconnected will stop marrying each other.

Evolution does not wait for a majority vote. Even when some walk away, the bodies and brains of those who stay keep changing. The Bajau did not grow larger spleens because every one of them loved the sea. The children of the people who stayed on the sea were simply born with bodies built for it.

December 24, 2100: Earthrise from the Moon

On December 24, 1968, Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders photographed the Earth rising over the lunar horizon. He later said: “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”[7]

On the same date 132 years later, a 12-year-old girl sits at the observation window of a base near the Moon’s south pole. The blue Earth climbs slowly above the horizon. She does not take a picture. The thin device behind her ear sends the scene, exactly as she sees it, to her grandfather in Busan, 380,000 kilometers away. He watches the same Earth from his kitchen. The two of them breathe in at the same moment. By the year she was born, most of the world’s people were already connected this way. In her biology textbook, Homo sapiens is not the name of living humans. It is the name of an ancestor.

The last century of Sapiens

The order in which Musk’s dreams come true is the order in which Sapiens ends.

• 2030: More than half of the world’s adults talk to AI every day. Handing memory and arithmetic to AI becomes as ordinary as wearing glasses.
• 2034: The first human sets foot on Mars, the starting line for human bodies living generation after generation outside Earth’s gravity.
• 2045: Ten percent of adults in rich countries use a brain chip or an always-on AI connection of equal power.
• 2048: The first baby is born on Mars. Its bones and heart grow from the start for one-third of Earth’s gravity.
• 2070: More than half of the world’s people carry at least one of a brain chip, a gene therapy or an artificial organ.
• 2100: People who have left the Sapiens standard on all three counts, where they live, the body they live in and the way they think, become the majority of humankind.

The median artery tripled in a century. The next century changes not a single blood vessel but the way humans breathe. The people on the far side of that change will call themselves by one name.

We are Homo conspirans.

Next in the series · AI Will Wire 8 Billion Brains Into One Superorganism, Like an Ant Colony: The Global Brain
Along 6,000 kilometers of European coastline, billions of ants live as a single colony that never fights itself. The day AI links 8 billion human brains, humanity becomes one living thing the same way.

Sources

1. Melissa A. Ilardo et al., “Physiological and Genetic Adaptations to Diving in Sea Nomads,” Cell 173(3), 569–580, April 19, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.03.054
2. Teghan Lucas, Jaliya Kumaratilake & Maciej Henneberg, “Recently increased prevalence of the human median artery of the forearm: A microevolutionary change,” Journal of Anatomy 237(4), 623–631, 2020. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7495300
3. Yuval Itan et al., “The Origins of Lactase Persistence in Europe,” PLoS Computational Biology 5(8), e1000491, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000491
4. TED, “Elon Musk: A future worth getting excited about,” interview with Chris Anderson, recorded April 6, 2022, transcript. https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_a_future_worth_getting_excited_about/transcript
5. Online Etymology Dictionary, “conspire.” https://www.etymonline.com/word/conspire
6. Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” New Dimensions 3, 1973.
7. NASA, “Apollo 8: Earthrise,” December 24, 1968. https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/apollo-8-earthrise/ ; Anders quote as credited in PBS American Experience, “Moon, Earth, Moon.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/moon-earth-moon