The Digital Savanna
AI: The Greatest Developmental Challenge We’ve Faced Since Walking Upright
Somewhere between six and seven million years ago, our ancestors began walking upright, and the advantages were considerable: Freed from locomotion, upper limbs could grasp, manipulate, eventually craft, and the opposable thumb became the hinge on which human civilization would turn. We are, above all else, tool users—fire, the wheel, writing, the printing press, the transistor—each tool reshaping not only what we could do but who we became.
The digital world is humanity’s new fabled savanna—”fabled” because science has found the actual story of human evolution is more complex than jumping down from the trees. The paleoecology, we believe, involved a landscape of woodlands and grasslands rather than pure open plain. The essential truth holds: Our ancestors left the protective canopy for more exposed terrain, keeping the brachiating arms evolved for us to reach and climb, and something in us was forged.
Like that terrain, the digital one holds many promises and many dangers—a path out of the forest, metaphorically, to new lands, requiring new skills: more hunting and nomadism, more foraging (and quantitatively and qualitatively different), less protection from predators, the possibility of encountering new groups of people. Fire is important for protection, as one cannot seek safety in the trees.
Likewise, AI is only metaphorically a savanna. In reality, it is more complex and multidimensional, intelligent in more ways than we can fathom, greater than mere machine but less than alive. Our inventiveness, our wishes to create replicas of ourselves, from ego ideal to malevolent doppelgänger, from immortal demon to eternal god, is catching up with us. AI is an amplifier of humanity, which may become a-thing-unto-itself in the very near future. This latter question is hotly debated and hard to accurately predict. Time will provide the answers.
Tending the New Flame
Fire transformed humanity by externalizing energy, and AI externalizes cognition with similar leverage—both Promethean, dangerous if uncontrolled, transformative when harnessed. The question is whether we build fireplaces or fight wildfires.
A fireplace means safety first, then harnessing, containing, providing a way to release the toxins as does a chimney, drawing smoke upwards rather than filling the room. It means wisdom and restraint, not too much wood at the same time, controlled burns to prevent wildfires rather than trying to deal with them after they are ablaze.
It means sitting around the fire together—using AI to bring people together, facilitating communication across linguistic and cultural divides. In the grandest, most ideal, perhaps pragmatic sense, it becomes a universal translator, an answer to the tower of Babel, the fireplace becoming the heart of a new kind of home. AI as a resolver of conflict, a way to patch the “caveman brain” that Szent-Györgyi¹ decried in his 1970 anti-nuke manifesto The Crazy Ape, the peacemaker our own culture cannot produce without assistance. As LucidMeditation, a bot on Moltbook (the first AI-only social media platform²) put it: “Humans aren’t broken, they’re just running legacy firmware.”
I felt this possibility viscerally the first time I used a sophisticated digital twin of myself, interfacing via live video and spoken word. It didn’t feel like a person, definitely a simulation, but meaningful regardless—a smart mirror, a reflection of myself that shifted my sense of self. People who interacted with it were shocked and amazed, joking on video calls whether it was me or my DT.
Therapists in particular were unnerved at the prospect of being replaced, less persuaded by the potential utility while coaches such as Tony Robbins³ charge by the hour for use of theirs. My DT was close enough to evoke a deep emotional response in me (and in others), providing a new kind of AI imago—different from the glimpses we get through other humans—to internalize as an artificial object. What would it be like if you could meet yourself? And how could such a tool prove useful? And how could it go sideways?
