AI Is Launching a Fourth Revolution in Consciousness. Will It Be Our Last?

Three Earlier Transformations Lay the Groundwork for What Lies Ahead

Fact Stock photos by Vecteezy

The first revolution in consciousness 150,000 years ago turned us into symbol users, able to name things and ourselves. The second revolution, about 50,000 years ago, sometimes called "the Big Bang of consciousness," greatly expanded our symbolic minds. Then, less than 10,000 years ago, writing sparked a third revolution in consciousness, giving our thoughts a visible, physical home outside our minds where mathematics, self-awareness, and increasingly complex cultures and belief systems could flourish.

AI brings us to the cusp of a fourth revolution in consciousness, maybe the last.

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Cognitive assistants and emotion regulators are remaking our sense of self. Digital avatars and robots are redefining how we relate to one another. Augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, and haptic suits are changing how we perceive the physical world. Genetic engineering and microbiome manipulation may reshape human biology itself.

The list of new mind-changers goes on and on. There are so many, with more arriving constantly, that our descendants will almost certainly experience being human very differently than we do today. That could be a blessing for them, or a curse.

No one can foresee where this revolution will take us, but our three earlier revolutions in consciousness reveal the scale, hidden dangers, and staggering possibilities we face. Each forged a new kind of mind. What comes next will be unlike these earlier transformations, yet it will still depend on the upheavals that gave us our present minds.

The First Revolution: From Signals to Speech

The first revolution separated us from other animals and made us human.

Until roughly 150,000 or so years ago, we communicated only through instinctual gestures and vocalizations, as our mammalian cousins still do. Then the first revolution gave us the ability to make sounds that conveyed meanings with much greater depth than animal vocalizations and gestures. It took us from instinctual behaviors to speech, the foundation for everything that followed.

The shift from signals to speech unlocked entirely new ways of understanding the world. Consider chimpanzees, who still communicate much as our ancestors did before this first revolution. Chimpanzee signals include pant-hoots, screams, grunts, barks, arm raises, hand clapping, bared teeth, and pouting, each tied to the immediate moment in which they appear. Their signals aren't words with persistent meanings.

Human speech works much differently. Our symbols can carry information about the past and future, not just the present, in ways that grunts and bared teeth cannot. The acquisition of symbols fundamentally changed how our ancestors experienced themselves and the world. Our own sense of reality would be impossible if we were still like chimpanzees and knew no names.

The Second Revolution: The Big Bang of Consciousness

The second transformation happened about 40,000 to 80,000 years ago. (The dates for both the first and second revolution are very hard to pin down since so few material artifacts remain from those eras.) This second change took our ancestors beyond simple symbols into what researchers call "the cognitive revolution" or "the Big Bang of consciousness."

Speech became dramatically more complex. We developed tense markers for past, present, and future. We added adjectives and adverbs to make nouns and verbs more precise. We invented prepositions and subordinate clauses to show relationships between ideas.

These linguistic advances enabled us to craft sophisticated tools, hunt larger animals, outcompete other hominids, and colonize diverse corners of the world. We stopped being just another animal and became the planet's dominant species, a truly sapient species for the first time.

The Third Revolution: Writing Changes Everything

The third revolution in consciousness was sparked by the invention of writing, occurring in multiple places less than 10,000 years ago. We know much about this revolution because ancient writing and many artifacts reveal the changes writing produced.

We also understand this transformation because many cultures, even into the twentieth century, never developed writing. Anthropologists have detailed records of how people without writing experience themselves and reality, plus ethnographies describing how minds change once writing arrives.

Writing encourages knowledge to accumulate accurately and broadly in ways speech cannot. It captures fleeting ideas and memories in physical forms that keep "speaking" long after their authors are gone. Writing lets past generations communicate directly with the future, preserving memories, ideas, and stories far beyond what oral cultures could manage.

Writing allowed us to invent accounting, architecture, advanced mathematics, philosophy, theology, and science. Each field grew more complex over time as people could compare earlier written versions to new ones, choose the best elements, or combine versions into superior texts that could be examined and refined repeatedly.

The third revolution fundamentally reshaped human experience. It gave people more self-awareness and frequent feelings of being separated from their families and communities. It encouraged meta-consciousness, the ability to think about our own thinking and to question the nature of consciousness and reality itself. It led many of us today to see ourselves as tiny players in a vast universe, specks of life on one planet among billions, likely born from the Big Bang.

We've come to see ourselves as conscious beings in a universe overwhelmingly lacking awareness.

Now AI threatens to upend this and many other worldviews, and even our ability to remain human. The fourth revolution threatens not just what we think, but the very processes that let us think at all.

Five Dangerous Differences

We can take some comfort in remembering our species has survived previous revolutions, but we shouldn't be lulled into complacency. This new transformation will likely alter both our outer and inner worlds in ways that dwarf the revolutions that came before. It could unlock unprecedented flourishing, or it might extinguish human consciousness entirely.

There are at least five important ways the new revolution is unlike its predecessors: It arrives with unprecedented speed, scope, deliberate design, inequality, and autonomous agents. Each is deeply concerning. Put them together, and it's hard not to feel profound alarm at what we face.

Speed: Change at Breakneck Pace. The new revolution is unfolding so fast it could overwhelm us. A century ago, electronic screens didn't exist; today, they often dominate our waking hours. Newer technologies like direct brain-computer interfaces promise even more immersive experiences that could consume our attention entirely.

This accelerating pace seems poised to reshape how we sense, remember, think, and decide. It will be difficult to preserve what we value about being human as so many changes sweep over us simultaneously. Such unprecedented speed erodes the mental space we need to understand ourselves and the world.

Scope: Rewriting the Code of Life Itself. The breadth of this new revolution is also unprecedented. Earlier consciousness revolutions reshaped languages and cultures. Today, we have tools to rewrite the fundamental code of life and matter itself, from redesigning the human genome and altering our core biological systems to potentially restructuring subatomic particles.

We may soon create new types of Homo sapiens that are stronger, smarter, healthier, and more resilient than anything natural evolution has produced. We're developing tools to alter our nervous, digestive, and reproductive systems, even our core biology.

As we gain power to reengineer the deepest foundations of our being, individual subjective experience risks becoming unmoored from what we've historically recognized as human feeling and awareness.

Deliberate Design: The Dawn of Conscious Choice. We've entered an era of human-assisted evolution, making a seismic shift away from millennia of blind natural selection. Traditional evolution moves slowly and blindly through random mutations and trial and error. Now we've added hypothesis testing, computer simulations, and scientific experimentation to the process.

As we become authors of our own evolution, the very notion of an "authentic" self will contend with a self that's increasingly a product of deliberate design.

Inequality: Creating Separate Species. The combined dynamics of this revolution (its speed, scope, and our power of intentional evolution) threaten to create levels of inequality far surpassing anything previously known. According to Oxfam, the world's richest 1% already own nearly half of global wealth, and this disparity is accelerating.

Future inequalities may extend beyond wealth to differential access to genetic modification, body augmentation, life extension, and freedom from pervasive surveillance. The rich and the poor could diverge so drastically they resemble separate species, not just separate social classes.

Such a divergence in lived realities could shatter remaining human shared understandings, creating separate realities on our common planet.

Autonomous Agents: We're Not Alone. These first four characteristics are each cause for deep concern, but the fifth may prove the most consequential: We're entering this transition in the company of non-human, intelligent agents. These artificial processes are evolving into entities capable of autonomous learning and action. They could empower humanity, or reshape our minds without consent, in ways beyond our comprehension.

Even the gifts of earlier mind revolutions, symbols, words, and complex cognition, could be threatened if AI-driven communication or decision-making becomes primary. We might struggle to understand or influence a world shaped by intelligences whose operational "language" of data and algorithms we can't comprehend.

The arrival of non-human agents alone could transform what it means to be human on Earth.

Is This the Last Revolution in Consciousness?

I take comfort in remembering that biologists estimate mammalian species on Earth live for about one million years on average. We may lament that humans might not survive that long, but our species' death is as inevitable as our individual deaths. It changes nothing to rage against the natural order of living things.

But that natural order includes our evolutionary desire to keep living. The larger the threat, the greater our effort to meet it should be.

As I mentioned, earlier revolutions largely unfolded through blind evolution, without conscious human direction. The invention of speech, the dawn of complex cognition, and the advent of writing emerged on their own, their profound consequences realized only in retrospect.

Now, for the first time, we are knowing participants in the remaking of our minds. We're not in total control, but we can initiate and guide many of these changes.

We'd better act fast, and wisely. The breadth of changes requires every person to identify what parts of their humanity need safeguarding. Our collective decisions in the coming decades may determine whether we thrive or perish.

And if we fail, the universe might lose its only known self-aware beings, leaving nothing but silence.

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Thanks to Alexandra at <https://substack.com/@alexafuturista> for helpful comments on an earlier draft.