Free Tomorrowland by Steven Kotler Page A

with genes you get radiation [rapid, radical change]: It’s true in dogs, and it’s true in humans.”
    Think of it like this: When a subset of a population is isolated from their ancestry, as this subset rushes to fill new — competitor-free — niches, the result is rapid evolutionary change, or allopatric speciation. But the exponential changes occurring today are examples of what could be called
technopatric
speciation, a process that occurs when a species is technologically isolated from their ancestry. Either way, the results are the same: rapid radiation.
    Right now, humans are the only hominid species on earth, but this wasn’t always the case and, as these techno-physio trends continue to unfold, it seems unlikely to remain the case. Juan Enríquez, founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School, believes we’ve already fractured our species. “We’re now no more than a generation or two away from the emergence of an entirely new kind of hominid,” he says. “
Homo evolutus:
a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over their own evolution and the evolution of other species.”
    The standard science fiction version of what happens after we take control of our evolution usually runs along eugenic lines — leading toward efforts to build a master race. But the situationis nowhere near that straightforward. Seemingly unambiguous genetic goals — like trying to make people more intelligent — not only involve millions of genes, raising the specter of easy error, but might involve conditional relationships. For instance, our intelligence might be tied to memory in ways we can’t yet decode, so trying to improve one’s ability might inadvertently impede the other.
    Moreover, without some form of top-down control, there’s little proof that human desires will be uniform enough to produce a master race. “Sure,” says Hessel, “we may begin optimizing ourselves and engineering our children, but it’s unlikely this will occur in a uniform way. We’re still human. So we’re going to engineer our children based on our egos, our creativity, our whims — this pretty much guarantees all sorts of wild varieties. It’s highly improbable that all of these varieties will be able to interbreed successfully, not without the use of technology. That’s when we really splinter the species; that’s why
Homo evolutus
could easily end up the parent to a Cambrian explosion of subspecies — a radical explosion of entirely new breeds of humans.”
    Science is not always factually accurate, but it’s usually directionally accurate. It is the result of torturous investigation, vociferous argument, and hard-won consensus. One of the best tests of veracity is when conclusions reached in multiple fields begin to strongly overlap. And that’s exactly what’s happening here. Fogel got the process started, but today, researchers from nearly a dozen different arenas have all lit onto the same conclusions. We have stepped on the gas of natural selection, turbo-boosted evolution, and are now speeding toward the end of an era — the era of
Homo sapiens
, which is, of course, the only era we have ever known.
    In short, we started out
us
, but we’re becoming
them
.

Vision Quest
    THE WORLD’S FIRST ARTIFICIAL VISION IMPLANT
I spent over a year exploring the cutting edge of artificial vision research for this story. I had all my facts. I was set to start writing. Then my editor received a postcard in the mail from a mostly unknown and somewhat controversial vision researcher. Essentially, all it said was: “Hello, I’m William Dobelle, I’ve built an artificial vision brain implant. It’s about to be installed in a human being, come check it out.”
Neither of us knew what to think. Certainly, I didn’t believe such a technology was possible. After a year spent delving into the field, no one I had met along the way was even close to a workable device, forget about one that could be