Subtitle: Why we won’t stop the rise of AI, even it means we go extinct.

“Homo Sapiens” means “Wise man”. "Sapiens" means wise. And let's be honest—have ya met us!?

We smoke. We doom-scroll at 2am. We build nuclear weapons and then just leave ‘em lying around. We build the world’s most powerful dopamine machines and then just set them loose on our children because they’re shiny and fun! We know exactly what we should do, and then we go and chase a technological squirrel.

Wisdom? Please.

But curiosity? That we cannot help. It's the one thing we do without fail, without exception, without being asked.

When a human is curious, absolutely nothing will stand in our way. It’s the one universal law in human behavior. And it’s why no matter how tired we are, we’ll always scroll to that NEXT social video, just in case that one is the one. You know what I’m talking about, admit it!

PT Barnum knew it all too well, and I would argue that the same forces that drove people to go see the world’s tallest bearded lady in his day are exactly the same forces behind more “serious” investments today than we’d care to admit. Simple curiosity. What will happen if we do this? What’ll happen if we put a bunch of money behind this? I don’t know! Let’s find out.

It’s the reason so many founders are happy to build world-changing tech, not particularly knowing how exactly their tech might actually affect that world, or as Sarah Wynn-Williams’ exposé Careless People points out in the case of Facebook, simply not caring.

Every invention. Every theorem. Every app. Every late-night rabbit hole all started with "I wonder if..."

Curiosity can lead to wisdom, but wisdom is only attained when we collectively agree that we’ve had enough. And I don’t see that happening any time soon, do you?

And here's what's interesting about AI: it can optimize. It can predict. It can generate. But it cannot wonder. It cannot stay up at night asking "but what if?" for no reason other than it needing to know. OMG did you hear what Claude wore to the meeting yesterday?? Dish! Dish!

We barrel ahead with technology not because we're wise, but because we genuinely can't help ourselves. Human curiosity is why AI is inevitable, no other reason. We are all just dying to know what ChatGPT 6.0 can do! And curiosity isn't a feature of being human—it's the entire operating system.

Some days that terrifies me. Other days it fills me with hope.

Most days, little bit of both.

It’s obvious that evolution is accelerating all around us, and that after hundreds of thousands of years of “not much” happening, we all get to witness a pivotal moment in the evolution of an entire species.

I don’t know what will become of humans in 20 or 200 years—no one does.

But if I were a gambling man? Some time down the road when our fossils are studied in museums of the future? I predict we won’t be called homo sapiens, but homo curiosus.

Hey Siri, Remind me in 200 years to look up what humans are called now.

Siri: Here are 10 recipes for baked potatoes.