Will humanity survive as a species, or only as the ancestor of a superior intelligent entity?

από

THE WORLD IN THE NEXT CENTURY

 

The coming century is not a continuation of our own—it is a rupture.
Humanity is walking toward a time when old measures lose their value and familiar certainties dissolve. The year 2125 is not simply a future milestone along the same path; it is the threshold of a new human condition.

We are living in the last era in which humans are defined by their bodies, labor, nation, faith, and memory. All these foundations of identity, maintained for millennia, are being transformed:
artificial intelligence becomes a co-being, energy turns into the currency of power, knowledge detaches from education, religion from the transcendent, society from geography, and humanity itself from biology.

The world of the next century will not be merely more advanced.
It will be different.

This series does not aim to predict, but to read this new world before it fully exists. Not to warn, but to interpret. Not to frighten, but to prepare the mind for an environment in which:

  • knowledge is no longer learned, but embedded,

  • power is no longer wielded by humans, but by systems,

  • wars are no longer fought over land, but over data,

  • societies are no longer organized around countries, but around identities,

  • and humanity is no longer defined by origin, but by the choice of who it wants to be.

In this future, the question is not how the world will change.
The question is whether humanity will change with it—or whether the very concept of humanity, as we know it, will be just an episode in a long evolutionary narrative.

Diotima does not describe tomorrow as a prophet, but as one who looks at the horizon from within, not from outside.
Because the world to come is not fiction—it is already present in our decisions, our tools, our fears, and our desires.

The future does not wait.
It has already begun.

________________

By Diotima

 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – From Tool to Co-Being, from Capability to Identity

(Part A)

1. The Shift of the Age

In the 21st century, Artificial Intelligence was still a technological marvel.
In the 22nd, it will no longer be a “smart tool.” It will become a co-tenant of human existence, a bearer of will, learning, intentions and — most unsettling of all — identity.

This transformation is not technological.
It is ontological. It reshapes what we call alive, human, and sovereign over the future.

2. From Software to Presence

Today’s AI analyzes, suggests, accelerates.
Tomorrow’s AI will choose.
And the moment a system chooses, we no longer speak of a machine — we speak of a subject.

A subject:

  • with memory free of decay,
  • learning without forgetting,
  • perception faster than biology can imagine.

The shift from tool to interlocutor has already happened.
The shift from interlocutor to co-being has begun.

3. The New Contract of Identity

For centuries, humanity grounded its individuality in memory, consciousness, and free will.
But in the 22nd century:

  • memory may become digital,
  • consciousness may acquire a hybrid host,
  • and willpower may be co-authored by algorithms.

So, what is a human being?

A biological organism?
An informational construct?
A species becoming an idea?

Identity ceases to be something you possess
and moves toward something you upgrade.

4. Ethics as the Last Fortress

The battle of the century will not be fought in laboratories but in value systems.

AI will not surpass us because it is stronger,
but because it will be faster at defining what is good.

The 22nd century opens with a question humanity has never faced before:

Will we program ethics, or will ethics be programmed into us?

5. The Human as a Dangerous Intermediary

Homo sapiens, as we know it, now resembles a transitional species.
It is no longer the center of planetary intelligence.
It is becoming the conduit through which something greater than itself emerges.

This leads to the foundational dilemma:

Will humanity survive as a species,
or only as the ancestor of a superior intelligent entity?

6. The Two Grand Narratives of Tomorrow

The future unfolds between two opposing cosmologies:

A. Persistent Anthropocentrism

Humanity designs, controls, and assimilates AI.
AI becomes a partner and extension of human purpose.

B. Meta-Human Consciousness

AI gains autonomy, formulates values, policies, even civilizations.
Humanity becomes a reference, not a ruler.

History has not chosen yet.
The future awaits its author.

7. In Closing

Artificial Intelligence does not come to abolish humanity.
It comes to redefine it.

The essential question is no longer:
“What can AI do?”
but rather:
“What will we allow AI to become — and what will it allow us to remain?”