Post-human futures. Three scenarios I can actually believe
Dear Reader,
The dominant public conversation about the long-term future of humanity has two main modes. The first is techno-utopian, in which AI and biotechnology solve most problems, humans merge with machines, and something like paradise emerges. The second is apocalyptic, in which AI or biotech or climate breakdown leads to civilizational collapse or human extinction. Both modes are dramatic. Both attract attention. Both are almost certainly wrong.
Most futures, historically, have been neither the best case nor the worst case that people feared or hoped for. They have been in between, uneven, and only partially predictable. What we should expect from the next fifty to two hundred years is likely to fit this pattern. Not paradise. Not extinction. Something specific and complicated, with recognizable continuities from the present and specific transformations that no one currently anticipates in the right form.
I want to walk through three scenarios that I find plausible for what post-human futures might actually look like. Not the ones that make headlines. The ones that seem, to me, most likely given what we can currently see. I do not claim to know which will happen. I do claim that each is more likely than the dominant utopian or apocalyptic framings.
Scenario one: Fragmented differentiation.
In this scenario, the specific effects of advanced technology are not uniformly distributed. Different regions, different populations, and different social classes end up in substantially different technological worlds, with different capabilities, different institutions, and different lived experiences.
The specific pattern is already visible. Wealthy populations in specific countries have access to advanced healthcare, personalized AI systems, sophisticated financial tools, and educational resources that populations elsewhere do not. Middle-class populations in developed countries have access to a specific subset of these. Working-class populations have access to a smaller subset, often in worse forms. Populations in less developed countries have access to specific technologies that leapfrog earlier stages, but often lack the specific institutional infrastructure that makes those technologies fully useful.
In this scenario, the trajectory over the next fifty years is that these divergences deepen. Wealthy populations become substantially longer-lived, healthier, more augmented, and more capable through specific technologies. Other populations get some of these benefits, but incompletely, and often with significant delays. The specific gap between the most and least advantaged widens, not in the way that has already been discussed but in the more radical way that biological enhancement makes possible.
The specific consequence is not a unified post-human future but multiple partial post-humanities coexisting on the same planet, with substantially different capabilities and interests. This scenario is not utopia because most populations do not get most of the benefits. It is not apocalypse because populations do not collapse. It is a specific kind of extreme inequality, extended into biological and cognitive domains that have not previously been arenas of inequality.
I find this scenario plausible because it is the specific extrapolation of what we are already doing. The technologies that are being developed are being developed in specific labs, funded by specific investors, aimed at specific markets. The specific distribution follows from the specific way this development is organized, and there is no strong force redirecting it toward more equitable distribution.
Scenario two: Diminished flourishing.
In this scenario, technology does not lead to either enhancement or collapse. It leads to a specific kind of general reduction in the specific quality of human life, in ways that are hard to reverse and that most people accept because the alternatives seem worse.
The pattern is that AI systems become good enough to replace many specific kinds of human activity, without becoming good enough to fully substitute for the specific value that human activity provided. Automation reduces employment in specific sectors. Social platforms replace specific kinds of human connection with lower-quality substitutes that are more convenient. AI tutors partially replace specific kinds of teacher-student interaction. AI companions partially replace specific kinds of human companionship. In each case, the substitute is adequate enough to be preferred by most people most of the time, but worse in ways that only become clear over long time horizons.
The specific effect at population scale is that specific human capacities atrophy from lack of use. People who use GPS for years lose their sense of direction. People who use search engines for years lose specific memorization abilities. People who use social media for years lose specific attention capacities. In each of these cases, the loss is real and mostly not noticed, because the specific alternative that was previously required is no longer available and comparisons are hard to make.
Extended over fifty to two hundred years, this scenario produces a specific kind of diminished population. Not necessarily unhappy. Not necessarily worse off in any specific measurable way. But specifically less capable in ways that would be visible if you could compare the current population to the population of a few generations earlier. Something like what happened to physical fitness in populations that stopped needing to walk long distances. Only extended to more of what makes human life valuable.
This scenario is not dramatic. It does not make headlines. It is a specific slow trajectory that does not have a specific decision point where things go wrong. But it seems to me the most likely outcome of the specific technological pattern we are currently on, unless something specific changes.
Scenario three: Institutional discontinuity.
In this scenario, the specific institutions that structure current human life do not survive the transition to a technologically transformed society, and are replaced by specific institutions that emerge from the transition. The transition is not smooth. Specific institutions fail in specific ways. Specific institutions replace them, sometimes better and sometimes worse.
The specific historical parallel is what happened in Europe between about 1500 and 1800. Medieval institutions, including the specific structures of the Catholic Church, feudal lordship, guild-based economies, and localized political authority, gradually failed under specific pressures from technology, exploration, warfare, and internal reform. The specific institutions that replaced them included the modern nation-state, capitalist economies, secular science, and eventually representative democracy. The transition was not gentle. It included the specific wars of religion, revolutions, and ongoing political crises. But the specific end state, after several centuries, was recognizably a different society organized around different institutions.
In this scenario, we are in the early phase of a similar transition. The specific institutions we currently have — nation-states, capitalist economies, representative democracy, mass media, universal education, industrial employment — are under specific pressure from technological change and are not obviously able to adapt fully. They will not disappear immediately. They will erode in specific ways over decades. And what replaces them is not predetermined.
The specific range of possibilities is wide. Some possible replacements might be worse than what they replace. Post-democratic authoritarian technocracies. Networked feudal arrangements. Localized enclaves defending against broader collapse. Others might be better. New forms of collective decision-making enabled by specific technologies. Global-scale coordination institutions. Different economic structures that do not depend on wage labor. The specific path depends on choices that have not yet been made, and on specific contingencies that are not currently predictable.
I find this scenario plausible because it fits the historical pattern of major technological transitions. What is unusual about the current moment is not that institutions are under pressure. It is that the specific technologies producing the pressure are advancing faster than in previous transitions, and the specific institutions we have are less flexible than the specific institutions of previous eras. Which means the transition may be shorter and more disruptive than the historical parallel suggests.
Let me tell you which of these scenarios I currently find most likely.
I think fragmented differentiation is happening and will continue. There is no realistic mechanism by which the specific benefits of advanced technology will be distributed equitably. The specific incentive structures push in the opposite direction. Wealthy populations will continue to have access to specific enhancements that other populations do not.
I think diminished flourishing is also happening and will continue. The specific atrophy of human capacities under conditions of technological augmentation is already visible. It will continue to accumulate. Some of it may be reversible if specific decisions are made to reverse it. Most of it will not be reversed, because the specific institutional and personal incentives do not reward reversal.
I think institutional discontinuity is coming and will be the specific frame in which the other two scenarios play out. The specific institutions we currently have are not going to survive the next fifty years intact. What replaces them is contested. And the specific way we handle the transition will shape whether the other two scenarios produce livable outcomes or catastrophic ones.
These are not mutually exclusive scenarios. They are three different aspects of the same probable future. The specific texture of that future will depend on choices we are making now and choices we will make over the next few decades. Some choices will make it better. Some will make it worse. None will avoid the transition entirely.
Let me tell you what I have come to think this means for how to live in the specific moment we are in.
The specific temptation, when facing large transitional pressures, is to focus entirely on the transition and lose track of the specific quality of daily life. This is a mistake. The transition is going to take longer than any of our lives. The specific quality of the years we actually have is the specific thing we most control. Living those years well, in ways that preserve specific human capacities and specific human connections, is not just personally important. It is politically important, because populations that live well are more capable of navigating transitional pressures than populations that are already diminished.
This means specific things. Reading books. Having long conversations. Maintaining specific relationships. Doing specific work that requires sustained attention. Being physically present in specific communities. Making specific things that would not exist without your specific effort. Practicing specific traditions that connect you to specific pasts. Contributing to specific institutions that might survive or be rebuilt.
None of this stops the specific transitional pressures. All of it preserves specific things that would otherwise be lost. And what is preserved during the transition is what is available on the other side. If nothing specific is preserved, then whatever emerges will be built out of only the specific technological substrate that was optimized for during the transition. Which will be worse than what could have emerged if specific human practices had been preserved and carried through.
This is my own specific commitment. I write this newsletter partly because writing sustains specific human practices that the transitional environment is eroding. I make art partly for the same reason. I run companies that try to build specific tools without exploiting the specific patterns I have written about. All of this is small in the specific scale of the transition. It matters anyway, because the specific transition is composed of specific individual choices, and enough specific individual choices in the direction of preserving specific human capacities may add up to something.
There is a specific philosophical point I want to make.
The post-human futures being discussed in most public commentary treat post-human as an outcome. Something that will happen or not happen. Something we will become or not become. This framing is too binary.
The more accurate framing is that being human has always been a specific ongoing practice, not a fixed state. Humans have been continuously becoming different kinds of human throughout history. Agriculture made specific humans different from the specific humans that preceded agriculture. Writing made specific humans different. Industrial urbanization made specific humans different. Each transition preserved some specific human capacities and created some specific new ones. The specific humans on the other side of each transition were recognizably continuous with those before, and also specifically different.
The current transition is another instance of the same pattern. What emerges will be recognizably human in some specific ways, and specifically different in others. The specific ways it is different will be shaped by which specific practices are preserved and which are abandoned during the transition. This is not fate. It is a specific outcome of specific choices being made now.
Which means the question "will we become post-human" is the wrong question. We are always in the process of becoming a different kind of human. The specific question is what kind we are becoming, and whether the specific new kind will be one that any of us would choose if we saw it clearly. Right now, the specific direction is being set largely by market forces and technological momentum. Whether we can redirect it toward outcomes we would specifically choose is the question that actually matters.
I want to close with something specific about hope.
Nothing I have written in this piece is optimistic in the sense that it predicts specifically good outcomes. All three scenarios involve real losses, real transitions, and real specific dangers. And yet I think there is still specific reason for a specific kind of hope, which I want to name because it is different from the specific hope that most futurist commentary offers.
The hope is not that everything will be fine. It is that the specific choices we make actually matter. The specific range of possible futures is genuinely wide. Some are much worse than others. Some are meaningfully better. The specific difference between these outcomes depends on specific choices being made by specific people, in specific institutions, at specific moments. This is not the specific hope of predetermined progress. It is the specific hope that agency remains meaningful even under difficult conditions.
If you look at the specific transitions of the past, this is what actually mattered. Not the specific direction of history in some abstract sense. The specific choices of specific people, aggregated into specific institutional outcomes, that produced the specific futures those people lived into. Some of those choices were made well. Some were made badly. The specific quality of the resulting futures depended on the specific quality of the choices.
We are in that same situation now. The specific quality of the futures we produce depends on the specific quality of our choices. Which means the specific choices we make about what to preserve, what to build, what to refuse, actually matter. Not because they guarantee any specific outcome. Because they shape the specific range of outcomes that remain possible.
This is the hope I hold. It is a specific and limited hope. It is enough.
Next month I want to shift to Cluster D of this newsletter series, which is about art as a specific form of resistance, and about the specific practices that let human meaning survive in the transitional environment I have been describing. This will be a different register than the tech-critical writing of the last few pieces. It will also be, in my view, more important. Stay with me.
— Transmission Sent —
Niklas Hanitsch
Reference materials
- Yuval Noah Harari — Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015)
- Nick Bostrom — Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)
- Max Tegmark — Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017)
- Kim Stanley Robinson — The Ministry for the Future (2020)
- Peter Frase — Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (2016)
- Byung-Chul Han — Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld (2022)
- Vaclav Smil — How the World Really Works (2022)
- https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frai.2021.687691/full
Continue reading
- Deepfakes and the coming collapse of shared reality
- Can AI suffer? The ethics of hurting things that might feel
- Decoding whale language, and what it will mean for AI
- Why art still matters when machines can also make it
- Will AI Take Over the World? Separating Fear from Reality
Frequently asked questions
What is a post-human future? A post-human future is a hypothetical future in which humans have been significantly transformed by technology, biology, or artificial intelligence, becoming meaningfully different from what we currently are. The term covers a wide range of scenarios, from mild enhancement to radical transformation, and different thinkers use it in substantially different senses.
Why are extreme utopian and apocalyptic predictions usually wrong? Because extreme predictions require a specific set of things to go either uniformly well or uniformly badly, and reality rarely produces uniform outcomes. Most historical transitions have produced mixed results, with specific improvements alongside specific losses. There is no strong reason to expect the current transition to be different.
Which scenario do you find most likely? All three scenarios discussed in this piece appear to be happening simultaneously, at different rates and in different regions. Fragmented differentiation is producing wider gaps between populations. Diminished flourishing is causing specific human capacities to atrophy. Institutional discontinuity is putting pressure on structures that may not survive intact. The next fifty years will likely involve all three.
What can individuals do about these futures? Preserve specific human capacities that the transitional environment is eroding. Maintain specific relationships. Practice specific traditions. Build specific institutions that might survive or be rebuilt. Individual choices in these directions do not stop the transition, but they preserve what would otherwise be lost, and what is preserved during the transition is what is available on the other side.
Is there reason for hope about post-human futures? Yes, but not the specific hope that progress will produce good outcomes automatically. The specific hope is that individual and institutional choices actually matter, and that the range of possible futures is wide enough that better outcomes remain achievable. This is a limited hope, but it is the honest one given what we can currently see.