A post by Noah Smith lamenting the societal impact of smartphones put me in mind of Species 8472. These were powerful creatures that appeared in four episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. Known by their Borg designation, they successfully counterattacked against the collective’s attempt at assimilation, before retreating to their native fluidic space after the Voyager crew collaborated with the Borg to deploy a nano-probe weapon against them.
Arguing smartphones weaken human fertility by undermining social cohesion, Smith suggests such tech developments may be the “Great Filter” limiting intelligent extraterrestrials: “Perhaps it’s not nukes, or bioweapons, or self-improving AI, or the intransigence of interstellar distances. Perhaps it’s simply the fact that biological evolution does not prepare any sentient species for technological evolution. When innovation begins, biological beings and their societies adapt and survive for a while, but as technological change accelerates, it inevitably overwhelms hardwired biology’s speed of adaptation.”
Species 8472 seemed to counter that thesis. They were the “apex of biological evolution,” as described by the Borg, which is why the collective wanted to assimilate them. Voyager’s holographic Doctor examined 8472’s triple-helix DNA and said this was the most “densely coded” species he’d ever seen. Whether such density would likely characterize an advanced species is dubious, however. The human genome’s distinct from that of other species not for having a large number of genes, but for how they’re expressed, enabling a complex, flexible brain that can collect and use information not stored in our genes.
Accordingly, cultural, rather than biological, evolution has been central to humanity’s dominance of our planet, as affirmed by a recent study in which Arizona State University anthropologist Charles Perrault calculated the geographic spread of humans over 300,000 years would’ve required 88 million years if accomplished through genetic change (and would’ve involved separating into some 2,200 distinct species). Perrault wrote: “Humans occupy a geographic and ecological range wider than that of any other extant vertebrates, having rapidly expanded into nearly every habitat on the planet. This expansion was driven not only by biological adaptations but, crucially, by cultural evolution—a process that enabled the rapid and cumulative acquisition of adaptive behaviors and technologies.”
That reliance on culture adds weight to Smith’s argument for the pernicious effects of smartphones, particularly as magnified through social media. For one thing, people obsessed with arguments on the internet are less likely to enjoy social or reproductive fitness. Moreover, an irony of right-wingers extolling genetic essentialism is doing so via tech platforms that exemplify how cultural change outpaces genetic adaptations. Oddly, though, a strain of eugenic thinking on the tech right also manifests as enthusiasm for human extinction, as detailed in an essay by Émile P. Torres, who co-coined the acronym “TESCREAL” for an overlapping set of ideologies: “transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism.”
Torres concludes: “All TESCREALists accept a posthuman eschatology. It’s the common denominator underlying all these ideologies. TESCREALists just disagree about the details. Those disagreements can lead to heated, vicious debates, but these should be seen as nothing more than family disputes. Everyone agrees with the same basic vision of the future: give birth to posthumanity, spread beyond Earth, plunder the cosmos for its vast resources, and build a glorious multi-galactic civilization at the top of the Kardashev scale occupied by potentially fast numbers of immortal space brains living lives of ‘surpassing bliss and delight,’ to quote Bostrom’s ‘Letter from Utopia.’ This is the ultimate telos toward which we ought to be striving, which is precisely what inspired the founding of AI companies now engaged in a reckless race to create an algorithmic God.”
The Borg fighting Species 8472 in a turn-of-the-century TV show seems, in retrospect, to have prefigured some aspects of politics in the 2020s, including that the Borg’s invasion of fluidic space now seems allegorical of the US and Israel’s overconfident entry into a war of choice. A tragedy of the current moment is that powerful technologies have emerged at a moment when authoritarian ideologies have political means to shape their future. “The weak will perish,” was 8472’s chilling telepathic message, though the species later took on a less-ominous posture. On Earth, the bad news is that might-makes-right has gained a moment of ascendancy, but the good news is that ascendancy’s fading by the day.