How Might Artificial Intelligence Influence Human Evolution?

Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more common and sophisticated, its effects on human lives and societies are attracting considerable attention. The question of how these new technologies might affect human evolution remains far less often asked, and most attempts focus on dramatic but perhaps unlikely events, including possibilities of human annihilation, assimilation, or enslavement. This article considers instead the inevitable but incremental evolutionary consequences of AI’s everyday use and human-AI interactions. I consider some possible forms of human-AI interaction, and the evolutionary implications of such interactions via natural selection, including forms of selection that resemble the inadvertent and deliberate selection that occur during domestication. The direction and rate of evolution can be hard to predict even for organisms kept under controlled conditions. Far more so the complexities of predicting selection and resulting evolution of humans in a fast-moving AI-rich world. Nonetheless, I extract several predictions, including the acceleration of recent trends toward smaller brains, selection on attention spans, personality types, and mood-disorder susceptibilities. Further, changes in intimacy-building and mating competition due to AI applications that act as friends and intimates are likely already affecting mating success and may influence the evolution of social behavior.