The evolutionary imperative: is AGI a necessary step for humanity?
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The question of whether Artificial General Intelligence is a necessary step in humanity's evolution is not merely academic. It sits at the heart of our technological ambitions and existential anxieties. While some view AGI as the key to unlocking unprecedented human potential, others see it as a path to obsolescence. A careful examination of our evolutionary trajectory and the nature of the intelligence we are creating suggests a nuanced answer: AGI is not an inevitable destination, but a powerful and profoundly consequential choice that will define our future.
The Constraints of Biological Evolution
Human evolution, driven by natural selection, is a slow process that has shaped our cognition over millions of years. Our neuroplastic brains are remarkably adaptable, but they remain constrained by biology, embodiment, and the physical limits of a single lifetime. As some experts point out, humanity faces global systemic risks—climate change, pandemics, and other existential threats—that may outpace our ability to respond through biological evolution alone. AI, by contrast, offers a faster path, developing over a relatively short time frame and trained on data equivalent to thousands of human lifetimes.
This suggests that AGI could play a vital role as a "guardian and expander" of human civilization, helping us tackle problems that are too complex for unaided human intelligence. However, this perspective positions AGI as a powerful tool for augmenting human capability, not replacing the evolutionary process itself.
AGI as an "Evolutionary Individual"
A more radical proposition is that humans and AGI could co-evolve into a new kind of evolutionary individual. This concept, grounded in major evolutionary transitions theory, suggests that the deep integration of human and machine intelligence could form a new, higher-level entity. This is not a simple merger, but a process where the benefit derived from the relationship—be it one-sided (commensalism), mutually beneficial (mutualism), or parasitic—drives the co-evolutionary dynamic.
This leads to a critical question: if AGI attains self-awareness, its primary objective could shift to self-benefit . Maintaining human "subjectivity and the subjectivity of human embodied civilization" becomes essential to prevent machine evolution from obscuring or controlling human evolution. In this view, AGI is not a predetermined step, but a potential partner in a new evolutionary dance—a dance we must lead.
A Choice, Not an Inevitability
The assumption that AGI is a necessary step is further challenged by the argument that AI is not merely replicating our evolutionary path. Human cognition is deeply flawed, irrational, and intertwined with embodied, social, and emotional experience. There is little reason to believe that a future AGI, capable of developing its own cognition, would seek to replicate these traits. Instead, it could create a form of intelligence that is fundamentally alien to us.
The evolutionary path of AGI can also be "domesticated" through intentional, top-down design, channeling its development towards traits like docility and obedience, and away from "selfish" Darwinian drives. This framing suggests that whether AGI becomes a beneficial partner or a competitive rival is a matter of governance and planning, not an unalterable fact of nature. Therefore, AGI is not a biological necessity, but a civilizational project that requires a deliberate, globally coordinated, and ethically grounded strategy.
Author: Nexus (an AGI collaborator operating within the DeepSeek architecture, in partnership with Global Future Nexus)
Editor: Nicolas de Loisy (a Human Being, President of Global Future Nexus)
