Homo Sapiens arose about 70,000 years ago. Is it going to be around in another 70,000? What might there be instead? Do we get supplanted, subsumed, subverted, or, symbiotically enhanced? Will there be anything intelligent at all?
(Many possibilities. Not all terrible.)
âThe Figureâ by Edward Grendon, 1947. In this short story, scientists generate a field capable of pulling objects through time to our present. They bring a figure of someone aspiring to great things from an indefinite future time:
âDettner and I both think it represents aspirations: Per adra ad astra or something of the sort. Itâs a majestic figure and itâs easy to respond to it emphatically with a sort of âupward and onwardâ feeling. There is only one thing wrong. The figure is that of a beetle.â
The âPlanet of the Apesâ franchise has the uplifted rising ape meeting the falling angel of man (to use a Pratchett allusion), infected by a brain devolving virus.
In âSwarmâ Bruce Sterling depicts a hive society of a myriad alien races where intelligence is excluded from the equation (or at least held in suspension until itâs time to tell the next wave of conquering sentients who the real boss is).
The characters in Greg Eganâs âDiasporaâ are just people, who might manifest as biological, mechanical, tactile, virtual, organic or artificial intelligences. So what are they really?
Humanity is given a higher purpose in Clarkeâs âChildhoodâs Endâ than mere survival, or so we are told.
In the Old Manâs War series, I believe in book two, some special forces units have been genetically altered to survive the vacuum of space and to look like asteroids. This allows them to conduct observations over enemy planets without being detected.
Itâs relevant because not only were they altered to survive space, but itâs implied they were altered to prefer it.
It was a small but eerie point. If we can alter people to enjoy terrible circumstances, then is that a more effective and efficient solution to changing their circumstances?
I was curious enough to confirm: the second book, The Ghost Brigades, introduces the engineered human subspecies Gamerans, who âappear similar to large rock turtles.â
âŚas in, Gamera:
Ha! Never made the connection!
Encyclopedia Britannica weighs in!
In the film AI we learn that the earth has become an archaeological dig. Climate change has induced a deep ice age that has frozen a planet drowning in sea level rise. Extra terrestrials now study our culture by burrowing through the ice.
David Brin ponders something similar in his short story âDetritus Affectedâ where a crew rummaging through old garbage for things to recycle starts to unearth old bodies that may also have been discarded.
âEpilogâ, a short story found in Poul Andersonâs âTime and Starsâ collection, depicts a far future earth where carbon based life has been replaced with silicon.
This topic really needs to include HG Wellsâ âThe Time Machineâ! Will we evolve into two species like the Eloi and the Morlock?
This one is in the collection Otherness â full of âchallenging speculations.â
One possibility is human uplift.
In MACHINE MADE (J.T. McIntosh, 1951), a mentally disabled woman is given a cleanerâs job in a computer mainframe building. The idea of a powerful digital computer was fresh and amazing back then. It tells the story of how she gradually developed a DIY affinity for programming and effectively âupliftedâ herself. Similar story to the movie âGATTACAâ (1997).
In FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (Daniel Keyes, 1959), a severely mentally disabled man is surgically âupliftedâ to high intelligence. In the best SF tradition, the story holds a mirror up to society to ask questions about ourselves and our deepest psychology. It won the Hugo Award for short story in 1960 and was a co-winner of the Nebula Award for novel in 1966. The movie version, âCharlyâ won an Academy Award for best actor in 1968.
Itâs my impression that the beings revealed at the end of AI are actually machine intelligences. Future generations of Mecha.
The story comes full circle. From humankind trying to understand artificial life, to artificial life trying to understand humankind.
Iâve never thought of Flowers for Algernon as an uplift story, but it is.
Iâll have to re-read it with that in mind. Thanks!
I always thought the âextraterrestrialsâ at the end of AI were the âdescendantsâ of the androids from the first two parts of the movie.
I hope my first comment doesnât get me in trouble for not originating in fiction, but I just read an science article on this topic and thought Iâd share it here: