13.4: The Future of Humanity

The Idea of a Human

Through biological anthropology, we’ve explored what it means to be human—how we are different from and similar to other species. We have considered whether other species have language, or whether it is uniquely human. We have looked at how categories like “race” have been used to justify treating people like sub-humans or non-humans. We have examined non-human primates and their similarities and differences to humans. We have looked at the ambiguity of “humanness” in the paleoanthropological record, asking whether Neanderthals and other hominins were human, and if so, why.

But the very definition of what it means to be human is changing. Historian Michael Bess explains: “…what we’re on the verge of doing with bioengineering technologies like CRISPR is going to be so qualitatively different and more powerful that I think it’s going to force us to reassess who we are and what it means to be human” (Illing 2018).

Taking the Long View

In our busy and complicated lives, we often take the short view, thinking about next week, or, if we’re really organized, we might have a five-year plan. The next generation or the next 100 or 1,000 years is typically not foremost in our minds. Thinking ahead, however, is essential for our own personal success and for the future of our planet. The value of looking ahead is captured in the much-cited Iroquois principle of “seven-generation thinking” where one considers the effect of one’s actions on generations living 140 or so years from now and acts accordingly. We are connected to the people of the past and are living in a world affected by their decisions and actions. The Long Now Foundation was created in order to promote long-term thinking on the scale of centuries and a sense of long-term responsibility. The Clock of the Long Now, designed to last 10,000 years and chime every century, exemplifies this extreme long view. In this section, we take the long view, and consider the future of humans and our lasting impacts on the planet.

Hacking Humans

In this age of genetic research, we are on the threshold of something entirely new—directly adjusting the human genome and the molecule of life itself—DNA. Gene editing has improved in recent years with a method called CRISPR/Cas-9. This technique delivers gene-editing components which target a section of DNA and snips out any mutations which are then replaced with the desired genetic material. Potentially, the method could be used to edit DNA to prevent diseases like sickle cell anemia or cystic fibrosis which are caused by a single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP—a change to a single nucleotide base in DNA (Saey 2017). Currently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is barred from clinical trials of editing embryos and the National Institutes of Health cannot fund such research. Scientists have used the technique to edit genes in a human embryo to repair a genetic mutation, but the embryos were not permitted to develop (Howard 2017). One fear is that editing embryos—human genetic engineering—runs the risk of designer babies or “CRISPR babies” that are smarter, prettier, or more athletic, essentially a “genetic elite”—a theme imagined in the 1997 Sci-Fi movie, GATTACA.

China has already begun using CRISPR on terminal cancer patients. American trials are awaiting approval from the FDA. The head of those trials, Carl June, thinks of the CRISPR trials and research as a kind of biomedical Sputnik, spurring technological competition between the U.S. and China. A second concern is how CRISPR will be regulated. Who will have access to it? Will dome be able to profit from it? The United States military is funding genetic research into gene editing, causing alarm over potential military uses (Nelson 2017).

CRISPR has implications beyond humans as well. It is theoretically possible for instance to wipe out mosquitoes that carry malaria or other disease-carrying vermin. Biochemist, Nobel Prize winner, and CRISPR co-creator Jennifer Doudna (2017) discusses the potential dangers of releasing edited animals into the wild, including upsetting the balance of an ecosystem or unintentionally wiping out a species. There is also the advancing field of “de-extinction” or resurrection biology—bringing back some version of extinct species using CRISPR. Doudna points that traits are created by the interaction of many genes, not to mention environmental conditions so it’s not clear whether de-extinction could be a reality. Ethical and ecological questions would also have to be addressed in light of de-extinction.

Perhaps most disturbing is the threat of “super-bugs” that are engineered to cause a global pandemic (Bresler and Bakerlee 2018). Using gene-editing to produce artificial SNPs bypasses the process of natural selection. While many of today’s diseases are typically zoonotic—transmitted from animals to humans (and vice versa)—gene-editing tools like CRISPR could bypass the process of diseases leaping from one organism to another by targeting a specific one instead by design. Whether caused by accidental release or intentional terrorism, the results of engineered pandemics are equally terrifying. With the threat of weaponized super-bugs, there is a call for creating infrastructure to develop vaccines to keep apace of the bio-hacked super-bug threat, which, with the added processing power of artificial intelligence, could easily and quickly go out of control.

A New Intelligence

In addition to bio-hacking changing the human landscape, other kinds of technology like artificial intelligence (AI) are blurring the lines between computers and human minds. Computers are outpacing humans at tasks that were once considered the exclusive domain of the human brain. The IBM computer Deep Blue beat Grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess, and it 2016 AlphaGo beat the best in the world at the complex game of Go (Koch 2016). More recently, AI has demonstrated superior performance to humans in standardized tests of creative potential, a domain once thought to be uniquely human (Science Daily 2024). Language model agents have even outperformed humans in programming tasks under time constraints, and AI has shown the ability to outperform human CEOs in strategic decision-making excelling particularly in data-driven tasks like product design and market optimization (AI Index Report 2025, Mudassir, et.al 2024).

In yet another major advancement, Google’s Deep Mind AI model called AlphaFold predicted the structures of over 214 million proteins, an achievement that earned a 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and solving a problem that had challenged scientists for decades, accelerating biological research in ways that likely would have taken humans centuries. By cracking the code of protein structures, researchers can potentially design proteins that would benefit humankind including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials, and tiny sensors, as well us helping us to better understand antibiotic resistance (Nobel Prize Press Release 2024; Varadi et. al. 2024)

AlphaGo and these newer systems continuously play or train themselves, steadily improving their skills through a process called “machine learning.” Learning, of course, is foundational to human and other animal culture and involves communication and cooperation between individuals. As different AIs eventually learn to “speak” to each other, Philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests that there is the potential for artificial intelligence to exceed that of humans, in what he calls “super-intelligence.” Bostrom says, “Think about it. Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make. The machines will then be better at inventing than we are” (Bostrom 2015).

Nick Bostrom compares the potential of artificial intelligence and humans to the very different pathways of humans and gorillas. One primate is on the verge of extinction, while the other has become a dominant species responsible for that annihilation (Khatchadourian 2017). What will happen to humans in the face of increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence? The future, he suggests, would be shaped by the preferences of this AI, and consequently we need to consider how to ensure that super-intelligence is aligned with human values. Who gets to decide what those values are?

Thankfully, many great minds and organizations, such as the Center for Humane Technology, are doing the important and urgent work of educating the public and our lawmakers about the need for caution and an evolutionary perspective before deploying AI tools at a mass and unregulated scale, to ensure that they work for the betterment of humanity and human society.

TED. (2025, May 1). Why AI is Our Ultimate Test and Greatest Invitation | Tristan Harris |TED. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/6kPHnl-RsVI?si=2gYDpmk29IS_mA8P

The Anthropocene

Other changes are taking place as a result of human intelligence and cooperation, like the rise of cities, massive dams, huge mining operations, irrigated farms, ocean acidification, surface temperature increases, ocean dead zones, deforestation, atmospheric conditions, and ozone depletion. Ice cores from Antarctica indicate higher levels of greenhouse gases today than in the last 500,000 years. If we reach an increase of 4 degrees Celsius, the use of the planet will change dramatically resulting in extinctions, crop failures, starvation, and huge migrations of people attempting to flee from climate disasters. This has many scientists, and many indigenous communities and elders worrying about the human impact on the earth’s systems.

Humans have become the most important agent of ecological and climatological change (Harari 2018). We may be a speck in the galactic sense, but we have transformed our little speck of the universe. Geologists divide time into epochs based on changes in rock layers, called strata, that correspond to changes in climate and environment. Technically speaking, we are currently living in the Holocene. Yet observing how we have transformed our planet, scientists are now proposing that we are living in a new age called the Anthropocene—the age of humans. Never before has a single species been responsible for altering its ecosystem on such a massive scale. We have become a geophysical force on par with volcanoes and asteroid impacts.

Geologists use fossils and chemical signatures to identify different geological periods. What might be the signs that future geologists will use to define the Anthropocene—the future fossils? Three contenders include fossilized chicken bones, increased radiation levels, and possibly plastics. The Working Group on the Anthropocene has been debating which signatures will likely prevail. This is a difficult prospect since our lifetimes are so miniscule compared to geologic time. The start date of the Anthropocene is also being debated. Some suggest European contact with the Americas and the resulting exchange of agricultural products and death of an estimated 50 million people from disease should mark the official start. Others think the beginning of the Industrial Revolution at 1710 is more appropriate. Still other think 1950 is a solid starting date with the onset of nuclear testing, increased use of plastics, fertilizers, and concrete, along with deforestation, risking carbon dioxide emissions, and increases in domesticated animals like chickens. Wherever you place the starting point, it is clear that humans have had an outsized impact on the planet.

Making New Stories: What Kind of Ancestors Will We Be?

We have looked at how humans are “swimming” in culture. Our own culture can be heard to see because we take it for granted or assume it is normal. Some of our most salient realities are created by people—everything from money to laws to some of our most cherished values. Even those who are not religious very often have deep-seated values that are sacred to them. Those values are in turn backed up by symbols and stories.

Nonetheless, our shared web of meaning, our sacred values and the symbols and stories that accompany them, can change in an instant. Previously illegal drugs like marijuana can suddenly become legal. Our nation’s long standing practice of the peaceful transfer of power from one presidential administration to the next can be disrupted through violence on the U.S. Capitol—an attack not just on the building, but on democracy itself. Even the ideals and values of our parents can seem quaint to us. With technology changing so fast, people worry that our values system cannot keep pace with the changes.

Historian Michael Bess cautions, “We need to sit down with ourselves and say,

‘As I look at my daily life, as I look at the past year, as I look at the past five years, what are the aspects of my life that have been the most rewarding and enriching? When have I been happiest? What are the things that have made me flourish?’

If we ask these questions in a thoughtful, explicit way, then we can say more definitely what these technologies are adding to the human experience and, more importantly, what they’re subtracting from the human experience (Illing 2018). As we experience new changes in technology and what it mean to be human, people, especially young people, have much power in deciding the shape of a culture’s values and the stories and symbols that support those values. The actions of your generation will shape the course of the future as we enter the Anthropocene. If we do this with eyes both on the past, our ancient story, as well as on the future, towards a new story, we stand to make better choices for our species and all beings who call this planet home.

This page was adapted from the following source:

Ruth, Susan (2023). 1.3: Pursuit of Food and 1.12: Future Humans. In Being Human by Susan Ruth. Open Educational Resource shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.