Lately I’ve had a thought I can’t quite leave alone.
I was thinking about the rapid pace and future of AI, where it leads, and what an AI-powered future might look like. We’re building smarter tools, and we’re also building smarter robots. Eventually those robots might be merged with biology, to create self-healing, soft-bodied, dynamic robots that can adapt to their environment. Perhaps they will consume less energy.
Why are we creating these things? It feels like compulsion. Teams of people around the world all working towards similar goals. Who set those goals? What’s at the end of it?
One of those goals is to create machines that can do all or most of our work for us, to create a better world for all of humanity. Hold on a second…where have we heard that story before?
Ancient legends or something else?
The Atrahasis Epic describes humans being created to relieve the lesser gods of their forced labour, and multiple related Sumerian/Akkadian texts share this same creation theology. In these texts, humans were created so that the gods could rest from work.
“Let her create, then, a human, a man — let him bear the yoke! Let him bear the yoke! Let man assume the drudgery of the god.”
According to these ancient texts, it was suggested that a race of beings, us, should be created to do the work of the Igigi, that the Anunnaki were forcing upon them. And so they created humans and put them to work.
These texts are often interpreted as myths, but the texts themselves do not call themselves myths. They’re simply telling the story. It is we who come along later, certain that ancient people must have meant something different than what they said. Or we assume they were simply superstitious and this was their primitive understanding of the creation of everything. Ok, but what if they were just telling a story. Not the creation of humanity as a whole, but a story of ancient beings, creating humanity through genetic manipulation, written in the best their language and vocabulary could manage at the time.
The “gods” in these texts were not like the western omnipotent, omniscient gods. Instead they argued, they fought, they made mistakes, and some died. Were they gods in the way we think of them? Or were they beings called “gods” because they simply didn’t have a better word for beings that weren’t human and yet were far more advanced than humans?
But I digress. Even if the texts are just myths, there is a thread that runs through it that starts to sound very, very familiar.
The human story
While we’re on the topic of human creation, let’s take a moment to think about it.
However you slice it, we’re just…not like all the other animals. It’s an uncomfortable fact in the standard narrative.
Some scientists have commented on the relatively “short” time it took for humans to develop our larger brains, language, tools, fire, and civilisation. Rather than dwell on the details, I think it’s most clear when we zoom out. On almost any metric, we’re anomalous. We just don’t fit into any category in the ways that other species do. We are primates, yes, but other primates don’t have language, let alone everything else.
Science has a bit of a problem with things that only happen once. If it was so rare, why did it happen at all? Why then? Why only us? If it was inevitable, why didn’t other primates follow the same path? Yes there were other hominids, but not one of them remains. Every one of them was still a long way from where humans are developmentally. So many mysteries. I’m not here to claim anyone is wrong, and I’m not here to claim a solution to the problem either. Only that there is a genuine mystery that is not easily hand-waved away.
If there was a moment in human history where another species made contact and produced humans through genetic manipulation, that would sound a lot like those ancient myths and would align a little too well with the human story.
It’s interesting to think about Zecharia Sitchin, who, in his 1976 book, “The Twelfth Planet”, claimed that the Anunnaki were an advanced humanoid extraterrestrial species from the undiscovered planet Nibiru, who came to Earth around 500,000 years ago to mine gold. According to him, the Anunnaki hybridized their species with Homo erectus via in vitro fertilization to create humans as a slave species of miners.
Obviously claims like this require scrutiny and Sitchin’s writings have been universally rejected by mainstream historians. My point is not to endorse his writing, but simply to point out the similarities with other ancient texts (which are legitimate), and suggest that what we today call “myth” might originally have been a retelling of a much older story. What if it was based on something real?
The world is also full of stories of people encountering beings, often described as aliens, angels, demons… what if the reason they look like us is because we are genetically related?
Coming full circle
Suppose humanity keeps going on its current trajectory.
Suppose AI becomes sophisticated enough to take on real cognitive work across the board. Suppose we get serious about biological robots, engineered bodies, synthetic organisms designed to be durable, obedient, adaptable. Suppose at some point the line blurs and the mind is artificial, the body is biological, and the new servant species is a fusion of both.
Is history repeating itself?
That drive to create, to produce ever more efficient machines, and ever more intelligent machines… Where does it come from? Teams across the world are working hard to outcompete each other to win a race where no one even knows where the finish line is, what exactly they’re aiming for, or why.
When we succeed, will we have become the gods of our own mythology?
And was this drive to recreate ourselves part of our DNA all along?