Dr. Peter H. Diamandis — Intelligent Self-directed Evolution

Global Future 2045: Towards a New Strategy for Human Evolution

Dr. Peter H. Diamandis
Abundance Engineer
Physician, entrepreneur, founder and chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation. Author of Abundance.

Intelligent Self-directed Evolution Drives Mankind’s Metamorphosis into an Immortal Planetary Meta-intelligence
We are extraordinarily fortunate to be alive on this planet during a period of unprecedented, exponentially accelerating, self-directed evolutionary change. We humans have begun to incorporate technology inside ourselves. Humans themselves are becoming an information technology. Over the last decades mankind has suddenly started changing from a loose collection of 7 billion individuals to a new kind of perpetually morphing non-physical social tissue woven from densely interconnected arrays of mobile person-nodes.

In this process we—humanity—are becoming a new organism: a meta-intelligence. As a species, as this new organism, we are becoming conscious on an unprecedented new level, in a new cosmic-scale realm.

As we are going through the metamorphosis process of becoming this new meta-intelligence organism, we are going from evolution by natural selection—Darwinism—to evolution by intelligent direction. We are starting to direct the evolution of our biology and of our minds ourselves. Before long, this will result in our minds becoming independent from their original biological substrate—the biological human brain—the evolution speed of which has become far too slow to keep up with our exponentially increasing pace of innovation and invention. As we begin to liberate our thoughts, our memes, our consciousness from the biological constraints that we presently have, this will allow us to evolve far faster and ever faster.

Beyond the great personal benefit of immortality, the species-level benefits of making our minds and bodies substrate-independent and non-biological include becoming a truly spacefaring species thanks to gaining the ability to travel near the speed of light while also remaining alive for far longer than the currently normal human lifespan. This will free us from the shackles of Earthly gravity and enable us to go explore and populate our solar system, our galaxy, our universe and what may be an infinite number of universes.

Persons are now empowered more than ever before. As an individual I can now already tap into ‘global genius’ anywhere in the world. This trend is accelerating at an exponential rate and will result in us—jointly and severally—to become quite god-like with ‘life-everlasting’. We will no longer have to die a physical death, enabling who we are—our mission, our purpose, our consciousness—to continue for a far longer time.

When we—mankind—will become fully conscious and self-aware as a planetary-scale meta-intelligence ourselves, we will be able to look out into the universe in new ways, with new kinds of ‘eyes’, and see thousands or millions or billions of similar conscious planet-level entities that have come into being all around us in our galaxy and the myriad galaxies beyond our own.

That all of this is happening during our lifetimes is powerfully extraordinary. That makes it so exciting to be alive right now.