Homo Erectus: exit, stage left; Homo sapiens: exit, stage right

The following article is the best summary I have recently encountered about the evolution from Australopithecines to Homo sapiens:

Twenty years of discoveries changing story of human evolution

Reading Brooks Roddan’s post, “The Last Writer In San Francisco,” (Monday, January 6, 2020) led me to think this morning about what it might be like to be the last writer, not just in San Francisco, but on the entire planet. I don’t mean creative writer. I mean a writer of any language.

Consider what the above article reports: about 130,000 years ago, the island of Java experienced climate change, and homo erectus faltered in adjusting to the new environment. Exit, stage left.

What if current planetary climate change leads to Homo sapiens exiting stage right, and artificial intelligence becomes the sole perpetrator and adjudicator of conscious logic? Robots totter forth as the only direct survivors of the Anthropocene’s protagonist. Would artificial intelligence invent its own alphabet to record its imaginative conjectures, and thereby begin engaging in altering ecosystems? Or would ambient computer codes become simply a tepid replication that functioned within the planet’s environment with about the same level of self-willed direction as amoeba?

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