Will Artificial Intelligence Lead to a New Species of Humans?
And will they all be rich?
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Who will be the winners and losers of the AI Revolution?
The answer may lie in teeth. One of the most fundamental features of a fancy-looking human often comes down to one thing: Do they have enough money to maintain or develop a fantastic smile?
What do expensive teeth have to do with AI, the inquisitive reader wants to know?
Everything.
You see, augmented humans are already among us. Their augmentation is simple, often cosmetic, but they’re here. And it takes a ton of cash to become one of them.
Maybe the whole process started with the classic nose job. I don’t know, really, and I’m not silly enough to research it. One thing is certain: Plastic surgery isn’t trending among the poor and downtrodden.
The Singularity
In 2005, a computer scientist named Ray Kurzweil wrote a book called The Singularity is Near,1 which predicted that artificial intelligence would not only overtake human intelligence by 2045, but that humans would probably augment themselves to the point that the very nature of being human would change.
The question becomes, who? Who will benefit from this sleek future?
If you’re a writer like me, probably not you. It’s gonna take pailfuls of money. Simple augmentations are already expensive.
Complex ones involving AI will most likely be affordable by an elite few.
One way to get an idea of what I mean is to take a look at a newfangled, albeit low-tech, non-AI goody: an anti-aging formula that boosts your body’s nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD for short.
NAD is a naturally occurring coenzyme that plays a key role in your metabolism. Metabolism, in turn, is, essentially, the process of turning what we eat into the essence of who we are.
This is why we say things like, “You are what you eat.” If you eat lots of bad foods and drink a lot of booze, your body will let you know. Metabolism will let you know.
But the quality of our metabolism also deteriorates naturally with age. As scientists and genetic engineers learned more about the process, they developed a formula that they christened NAD+, which, they say, improves the natural behavior of NAD.
Early field tests of the formula are promising. It is said to reduce the effects of aging through cellular repair. They used high-tech to make it, but you use low-tech to pop the pill. A three-month supply costs $100+.
That’s by no means unaffordable, but it’s also not something you can justify to your inner accountant if you’re barely making rent.
When you take a deeper dive into higher-tech human enhancement trends, it’s not a stretch to conclude that only a few lucky people will be able to afford most of it.
That’s because things start to get really expensive when you look at the more exciting stuff. Stuff+ is gonna cost you.
The cost of human enhancement technology
Tech that improves sight and hearing is one example. The cost of a bone-anchored hearing aid (BAHA) can range from $4,500 to $8,000, although in some countries, its costs might be covered by the government.
According to eSight,2 a developer of eyesight assistance hardware and software that provides eyesight to legally blind people, you’ll pay about $7,000 for a device that looks a little like a VR headset.
More futuristic enhancements include bioprinting, which uses 3D printing techniques to generate living tissue, including skin and bone. The hope is that someday it will generate new organs.
Then there’s Guardian XO. Guardian XO is, according to its manufacturer, “a full-body industrial exoskeleton robot” that “is the perfect synergy of human and machine. It is revolutionizing the way work gets done.”3
Think Pacific Rim, without the angry subterranean dude as your boxing opponent:
The Japanese, who have been players in the robotics field for a long time, are also heavily involved in robotic exoskeletons for humans.
For example, Cyberdyne, a Japanese robotics company, linked up with Tsukuba University4 to create HAL, an exoskeleton based on a prototype by Yoshiyuki Sankai,5 who spent three years mapping the neurons that govern human leg movement.
These aren’t necessarily bad developments. People like Sankai appear to be motivated by a desire to help people
Then, there’s Elon Musk, who might say he is interested in improving people’s lives but has proven during the last couple of years that he is not. Musk’s Neuralink is trying to develop a working brain-computer interface (BCI). You can bet that Elon will charge a pretty penny for it after he’s finished killing all the animals required to ramp things up.
Neuralink has the additional benefit of being an Elon Musk outfit, so it’s already rife with questionable practices (like killing monkeys).6
I know I can’t afford this stuff.
Do you notice the progression of the examples I’ve included here? We went from pretty teeth to brain-computer interfaces. The costs will be progressively expensive, too, as the complexities increase.
Moral considerations will also continue to escalate, but will pass most of us by because modern humans tend to stay in their lane as they focus on paying ever more for rent and high-tech cars. Just as the noise of Donald Trump’s behavior becomes normalized and absorbed into our work-a-day ether, so will the various news reports of AI advancements.
An AI economic apocalypse?
This brings me to Daron Acemoglu7 and Simon H. Johnson,8 economists at MIT, who have written a 546-page tome called Power and Progress9 that pushes back on the notion that technology automagically leads to improvements in economic progress.
On the contrary, they say that the winners of technological progress are always the capitalists who were already in control of the economy.
These guys are no socialists. Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
A traditional economic centrist, Acemoglu scored a lot of his creds with two books on how the economics of dictatorships turn countries into failed states: Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (2006) and Why Nations Fail.10
The second book was a smash hit in economic circles. It declared that authoritarian states run their economies into the ground. It was well received because it is basically true.
Now, in their book Power and Progress, Acemoglu and Johnson have gathered substantial evidence to show that major technological advances during the last ten centuries have benefitted a central caste of power elites, but not the workers the advancements replaced.
The workers that were replaced were hammered by rising poverty as they were relegated to second-class citizenship. The book also describes how other segments of society also suffered hardships.
Given that the book is 500+ pages, you can imagine that they are going to give you lots of examples. I’ll stick to a small sample that will resonate.
Early advances in agriculture
Acemoglu and Johnson’s research showed that Medieval and early modern agricultural workers didn’t benefit at all from improved plows, ox-drawn carts, or even crop rotation. Their feudal overlords did.
Even today, mechanical harvesters and other modern farm equipment that have improved farm productivity are now mostly being taken advantage of by huge farms operated by agribusiness corporations while the American small farmer is wiped off the map.11
Advances in ship design
The authors note that ship design improvements made it easier to navigate oceans. These same ship designs also led to the Middle Passage, which delivered slaves to the Americas under miserable conditions.12
The cotton gin
Americans were taught in school that the cotton gin was a boon to cotton production. That’s a fair claim. It turned the United States into the world’s largest cotton exporter and helped build a North American empire.
But it also further entrenched the horrors of slave owners who brutalized their African prisoners providing them free labor.
British textile factories
One of the mainstays of the British industrial revolution was its infrastructure of textile factories. Rather than help workers, according to Acemoglu and Johnson, the factories led to longer worker hours, lower wages, and horrible conditions.
Modern horrors continue. In 2013, a textile plant in Bangladesh collapsed,13 killing 1,134 people. The accident wasn’t directly caused by machinery. However, the fact that there were so many workers in one place running textile machines was a side-effect of the Indian subcontinent’s low-wage industrialization.
Artificial fertilizers
The authors also point to the German chemist Fritz Haber’s advancement in artificial fertilizers, which he and other German scientists later used as a basis for chemical weapons that devastated the World War One battlefields.
Trumpism
According to the authors, “Spectacular advances in computers have enriched a small group of entrepreneurs and business tycoons over the last several decades, whereas most Americans without a college education have been left behind…”
The authors don’t go on to specifically link these changes to Trumpism, but I will. As we all know, there is a large segment of very unhappy Americans who feel left behind by politicians, tech companies, and science.
Those advances also personally benefited me as a software engineer, so trust me, I’m not decrying that trend. That’s not what this is about. What alarms the authors, and me, is the unabated march of money out of our hands and into the hands of a few.
The Rise of the AI Machines
Suddenly, almost overnight, many workers are faced with an onslaught of machines and software that can do their jobs. From legal beagles to artists to writers to coders, it’s hitting everyone.
Meanwhile, videos called deepfakes can trick viewers into thinking they’re watching real people do everything from saying terrible things to having sex with monkeys.
If you think things are bad now, just give it a decade as bad actors use AI to create an entire layer of AI-generated videos showing people doing things they didn’t do.
You’ve already seen CGI bring dead actors back to life in movies such as “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (Peter Cushing).14
These days, you were able to spend time during the U.S. presidential campaign watching videos portraying “Biden and Trump” screaming expletives at each other on Twitch or deploying fake campaign ads, among other things.
The ad above was made by Comedy Network’s Daily Show to make a point. It won’t take much effort for you to identify something like this as computer-generated, but remember, it wasn’t all that long ago that people were writing their novels on Selectrics.15
But aren’t we all better off?
Acemoglu and Johnson aren’t suggesting that technology hasn’t been beneficial to society as a whole. It has. They’re not Luddites.16
Their book points to a ton of benefits derived from technology. For example, in the later stages of industrialization, wages rose 123%. Forever long working days became eight or nine-hour days, and life expectancy rose.
China saw hundreds of millions of people enter the middle class from deep levels of rural poverty. There’s a thriving class of Indian and East European software engineers. Etc., etc.
AI is having a positive impact in many areas, such as medical technology and scientific research.
Turning off technology would be very silly, even if it could be done.
So, yes, society has benefitted from technological change. But not without a fight.17 Workers had to build unions and codify protections against things like child labor into law. A war was fought in America over slavery.
Acemoglu is worried that AI may tip the scales in regard to wide-ranging benefits. He’s worried that the only beneficiaries of AI in the long run will be the people at the highest level of the world’s power structure and that the long run is fast approaching.
What does the future look like?
Business Insider’s Aki Ito18 describes a series of long conversations with Acemoglu, who has over the last several years become cozy with a number of AI technologists:19
Over the course of three conversations this summer, Acemoglu told me he’s worried we’re currently hurtling down a road that will end in catastrophe. All around him, he sees a torrent of warning signs — the kind that, in the past, wound up favoring the few over the many.
Power concentrated in the hands of a handful of tech behemoths.20 Technologists, bosses, and researchers focused on replacing human workers instead of empowering them. An obsession with worker surveillance.
Record-low unionization. Weakened democracies. What Acemoglu’s research shows — what history tells us — is that tech-driven dystopias aren’t some sci-fi rarity. They’re actually far more common than anyone has realized.
Acemoglu foresees a system of haves and have-nots that will make our current system look like a benign and loving world family in comparison:
“There’s a fair likelihood that if we don’t do a course correction, we’re going to have a truly two-tier system,” Acemoglu told me. “A small number of people are going to be on top — they’re going to design and use those technologies — and a very large number of people will only have marginal jobs, or not very meaningful jobs.” The result, he fears, is a future of lower wages for most of us.
Acemoglu says that AI has the potential to benefit humanity on a mass scale, but that the way our current system is set up is likely to result in the opposite.
He doesn’t want to put a halt to AI. Even if he did, the genie is out of the bottle.
Instead, Acemoglu wants to be certain that the levers for controlling it are in the hands of the people who should benefit from it. He wants you and me to control it, not a small group of tech entrepreneurs who, if handed the keys to such awesome power, will probably roll over us without mercy.
I wrote a novel about this theme, probably around the same time Acemoglu and Johnson were thinking about it. My novel MagicLand is set 3,000 years in the future, long after the tech elites have made a decision on what to do with the pesky peasants who demand more control over their lives.
The history of MagicLand is based on the very real possibility that the elites could simply grow tired of the rest of us, and put us out to pasture.
In MagicLand, that is what they do. As they begin to attain Kurzweil’s singularity, as they augment themselves into a new species, the elites in the novel decide to simply do away with those who didn’t possess enough money to join the party. So they launch a series of three major eradications to simply wipe them out.
Eventually, two new human species develop. One is an augmented species, the other consists of survivors who miraculously rediscover the power of magic.
Realistically, that second development is wishful, fantasized thinking (but it made for some fun world-building).
The reality will be much different unless we seize control now.
Footnotes
Thanks for reading!
“The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI (Hardcover).” 2023. McNally Jackson Books. 2023. https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/book/9780399562761.
“ESight - Electronic Eyewear for the Visually Impaired.” 2024. ESight Eyewear. November 27, 2024. https://www.esighteyewear.com/.
“Guardian XO.” 2023. ROBOTS: Your Guide to the World of Robotics. March 20, 2023. https://robotsguide.com/robots/guardianxo. The company seems to have been acquired by a company called Palladyne AI.
Contributors. 2005. “University in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. June 20, 2005. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Tsukuba.
Contributors. 2015. “Japanese Businessman.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. March 4, 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshiyuki_Sankai.
Levy, Rachael. 2022. “Musk’s Neuralink Faces Federal Probe, Employee Backlash over Animal Tests.” Reuters. December 5, 2022. https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-neuralink-faces-federal-probe-employee-backlash-over-animal-tests-2022-12-05/.
“Daron Acemoglu | MIT Economics.” 2019. Mit.edu. 2019. https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/daron-acemoglu.
“Simon Johnson | MIT Sloan.” 2025. MIT Sloan. January 3, 2025. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/simon-johnson.
Acemoglu, Daron, and Simon Johnson. 2023. Power and Progress. PublicAffairs. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/daron-acemoglu/power-and-progress/9781541702530/.
Contributors. 2012. “Book by Acemoğlu and Robinson.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. August 4, 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Nations_Fail.
Zimmerman, Sarah. 2024. “The US Continues to Lose Farms. Here’s How Much.” Agriculture Dive. February 14, 2024. https://www.agriculturedive.com/news/usda-ag-census-report-farms-decline/707536.
Holland, Oscar. 2023. “10 Years after Rana Plaza, Is Bangladesh’s Garment Industry Any Safer?” CNN. April 24, 2023. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/rana-plaza-garment-worker-rights-accord/index.html.
Hemenway, Megan. 2023. “10 Actors Brought Back from the Dead with CGI.” ScreenRant. Screen Rant. June 17, 2023. https://screenrant.com/dead-actors-brought-back-with-cgi/.
Contributors. 2002. “A Popular Line of Typewriters from IBM.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. June 13, 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric.
Contributors. 2001. “Organization of English Workers in the 19th Century Protesting Adoption of Textile Machinery.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. October 16, 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite.
“Pluralistic: Brian Merchant’s ‘Blood in the Machine’ (26 Sep 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily Links from Cory Doctorow.” 2023. Pluralistic.net. September 26, 2023. https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen.
“Aki Ito.” 2022. Business Insider. 2022. https://www.businessinsider.com/author/aki-ito.
Ito, Aki. 2024. “AI-Driven Cataclysm Could Rock the Job Market: Top Economist.” Business Insider. October 14, 2024. https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-chatgpt-replace-jobs-unemployment-salaries-technology-economist-daron-acemoglu-2023-9.
Wakabayashi, Daisuke. 2020. “The Antitrust Case against Big Tech, Shaped by Tech Industry Exiles.” Nytimes.com. The New York Times. December 20, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/technology/antitrust-case-google-facebook.html.
