What will become of human centrality as our species is knocked off its pedestal by machines more intelligent than we are and de-centered by the humbling realization that survival depends on reducing our outsized footprint on this fragile planet? 

The vise of these two developments is prompting a rethinking of what humanism might mean in the oncoming future.

The controversies of late over the perils and promise of generative AI have raised anew the philosophical question of where technological sovereignty ends and human autonomy begins. Will the super-intelligent capacities of the putative servant we have invented end up being our actual master?  

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It has happened many times before that species were wiped out by others that were smarter. We humans have already wiped out a significant fraction of all the species on Earth. That is what you should expect to happen as a less intelligent species – which is what we are likely to become, given the rate of progress of artificial intelligence. The tricky thing is, the species that is going to be wiped out often has no idea why or how.

Take, for example, the west African black rhinoceros, one recent species that we drove to extinction. If you had asked them: “What’s the scenario in which humans are going to drive your species extinct?” what would they think? They would never have guessed that some people thought their sex life would improve if they ate ground-up rhino horn, even though this was debunked in medical literature. So, any scenario has to come with the caveat that, most likely, all the scenarios we can imagine are going to be wrong.