- This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
What will humans be like generations from now in a world transformed by artificial intelligence (AI)? Plenty of thinkers have applied themselves to questions like this, considering how AI will alter lives – often for better, sometimes for worse.
They have conjured dramatic scenarios, like AI-driven extinction of humans (and many other species), or our assimilation into human-AI cyborgs. The predictions are generally grim, pitting the fate of all humans against a unitary (or unified) AI opponent.
What if the AI future doesn’t stretch to these sci-fi dystopias? For an evolutionary biologist, seeing AI technologies diversify into all manner of applications looks a lot like the proliferation of microbes, plants and animals in an ecological landscape.
