Humanity 2.0
The Co-Becoming of Homo Sapiens and AI
"The distinction between humans and augmented humans
and human-like non humans is going to diminish over time.
- Mark Seligman, Author of AI and ADA: Artificial Translation
and the Creation of Literature
"The distinction between humans and augmented humans
and human-like non humans is going to diminish over time.
- Mark Seligman, Author of AI and ADA: Artificial Translation
and the Creation of Literature
The reflections below are prompted by the work of Mark Seligman, a linguist, AI researcher, and entrepreneur whose career has focused on machine translation, speech translation, and the relationship between language and artificial intelligence. He is the founder and CEO of Spoken Translation, Inc., and in the late 1990s helped organize one of the first speech-translation systems capable of broad conversational coverage.
In the interview with the New Books Network on his book AI and ADA, Artificial Translation and the Creation of Literature, Seligman reflects on the possibility of a “great transition” between Humanity 1.0 and Humanity 2.0, and on what such a transition might mean for our understanding of art, language, intelligence, and personhood itself. He situations the transition, not only in the context of AI technologies but also space, communication, and genetic technologies, but the conversation on AI takes pride of place. You can hear the interview by scrolling to the bottom of this page.
New Ways of Being Human
As a process thinker, I am interested in the idea of “great transitions” in human existence. Years ago, I was deeply shaped by the work of the process philosopher John B. Cobb Jr., who suggested that human beings have, over long stretches of history, embodied different “structures of existence.” On this view, there is no single, fixed way of being human. Human existence evolves culturally, spiritually, psychologically, and relationally.
One of the most important thresholds in this evolution was what philosophers and historians call the Axial Age — the remarkable period roughly between the eighth and third centuries BCE in which reflective, self-conscious, ethically universal, and spiritually searching forms of life emerged in different parts of the world. During this period we see the appearance of figures and traditions such as Confucius and Laozi in China, the Upanishadic and Buddhist traditions in India, the Hebrew prophets in Israel, and Socrates and Plato in Greece. Human beings began to experience themselves differently: less tribally enclosed, more inwardly reflective, more ethically expansive, and more conscious of the tension between what is and what ought to be.
If Cobb is right, the transition from pre-axial to post-axial existence was not simply a change in ideas. It was a transformation in the very structure of human selfhood and social imagination — a new way of inhabiting reality.
The question raised by contemporary artificial intelligence is whether humanity now stands at another such threshold. Are AI systems merely sophisticated tools, or are they inaugurating another axial shift in human existence? Are they altering not simply what we can do, but what it means to be human — how we think, create, communicate, remember, imagine, and relate? And if so, what kinds of wisdom, compassion, and spiritual depth will be needed as Humanity 2.0 emerges?
Seligman raises this possibility. He believes that today LLM's are intelligent in what they can do, but that they lack deep memory, genuine identity, and true feeling. And yet he also believes that, over time, they may and probably will develop all three. I offer some definitions.
If these capacities are developed, whether in 20 years or 200 years, AI systems will then become non-human machines with whom (or which, take your pick) we will interact and co-evolve.
To be sure they will not have biological substrates: "wet brains" as some put it. They will not be carbon-based but may instead be silicon-based, or based on some other material as yet undetermined. Or, perhaps, not based on any three-dimensional substrate at all. Still, if they have deep memory, genuine identity, and true feeling, they will be minds.
In the interview with the New Books Network on his book AI and ADA, Artificial Translation and the Creation of Literature, Seligman reflects on the possibility of a “great transition” between Humanity 1.0 and Humanity 2.0, and on what such a transition might mean for our understanding of art, language, intelligence, and personhood itself. He situations the transition, not only in the context of AI technologies but also space, communication, and genetic technologies, but the conversation on AI takes pride of place. You can hear the interview by scrolling to the bottom of this page.
New Ways of Being Human
As a process thinker, I am interested in the idea of “great transitions” in human existence. Years ago, I was deeply shaped by the work of the process philosopher John B. Cobb Jr., who suggested that human beings have, over long stretches of history, embodied different “structures of existence.” On this view, there is no single, fixed way of being human. Human existence evolves culturally, spiritually, psychologically, and relationally.
One of the most important thresholds in this evolution was what philosophers and historians call the Axial Age — the remarkable period roughly between the eighth and third centuries BCE in which reflective, self-conscious, ethically universal, and spiritually searching forms of life emerged in different parts of the world. During this period we see the appearance of figures and traditions such as Confucius and Laozi in China, the Upanishadic and Buddhist traditions in India, the Hebrew prophets in Israel, and Socrates and Plato in Greece. Human beings began to experience themselves differently: less tribally enclosed, more inwardly reflective, more ethically expansive, and more conscious of the tension between what is and what ought to be.
If Cobb is right, the transition from pre-axial to post-axial existence was not simply a change in ideas. It was a transformation in the very structure of human selfhood and social imagination — a new way of inhabiting reality.
The question raised by contemporary artificial intelligence is whether humanity now stands at another such threshold. Are AI systems merely sophisticated tools, or are they inaugurating another axial shift in human existence? Are they altering not simply what we can do, but what it means to be human — how we think, create, communicate, remember, imagine, and relate? And if so, what kinds of wisdom, compassion, and spiritual depth will be needed as Humanity 2.0 emerges?
Seligman raises this possibility. He believes that today LLM's are intelligent in what they can do, but that they lack deep memory, genuine identity, and true feeling. And yet he also believes that, over time, they may and probably will develop all three. I offer some definitions.
- Deep memory: the capacity, not simply to retrieve 'information' from the past, but to carry forward experiences over time in ways that shape present perception, interpretation, attachment, and response. Deep memory involves feeling and creative interpretation.
- Genuine identity: the emergence of a relatively enduring center of selfhood with its own continuity, perspective, character, and sense of “being this self and not another.”
- True feeling: the capacity for lived emotional experience: not merely processing information about emotions, but actually undergoing forms of enjoyment, suffering, care, longing, wonder, or concern from the inside.
If these capacities are developed, whether in 20 years or 200 years, AI systems will then become non-human machines with whom (or which, take your pick) we will interact and co-evolve.
To be sure they will not have biological substrates: "wet brains" as some put it. They will not be carbon-based but may instead be silicon-based, or based on some other material as yet undetermined. Or, perhaps, not based on any three-dimensional substrate at all. Still, if they have deep memory, genuine identity, and true feeling, they will be minds.
Nine Ideas
I realize that there are some who dismiss the idea that AI systems can have "minds" from the outset. They are committed to the view that minds necessarily have carbon-based or biological subsrates. But as a process thinker influenced by the philosophy of Whitehead, I think the possibility of AI minds is an empirical not a metaphysical question, and I bring to the discussion nine ideas that inform my cautious receptivity. All are shaped by Whitehead's process philosophy or, as he put it, his "philosophy of organisms."
1. Mind Already Exists Throughout Nature
Minds understood as entities with physical feeling, conceptual feeling, and emotion already exist throughout the whole of nature. Indeed, from a Whiteheadian perspective, such experiential entities are ultimately all that exists. Every actual entity or “concrescing subject” prehends, feels, and responds in some way, even if at very primitive levels. The basic constituents of reality are not inert bits of matter but momentary acts of experience.
2. There Can Be Degrees of Mind
Mind exists by degree. There can be varying degrees of physical feeling, conceptual feeling, emotional intensity, awareness, integration, and responsiveness. Some entities possess richer and more intense forms of mind than others. Thus the issue is not whether something has mind absolutely speaking, but how much mind, how much feeling, how much conceptuality, and how much emotional richness are present.
3. Consciousness Is an Emergent Property: Minds need not be conscious.
Consciousness is a distinctive form of mind characterized by clear and distinct perception, conceptual awareness, and self-consciousness. From a process perspective, consciousness is emergent. There were vast epochs of cosmic history—atomic, galactic, and geological—in which there was something like mind or feeling present in reality, but not necessarily consciousness in the fully developed sense found in animals and human beings. Consciousness gradually emerged through increasingly complex forms of relational organization.
4. Some Minds Become Centers of Awareness
There are also distinctive forms of mind that function as centers of awareness. These are minds that receive influences from many other experiential entities and initiate coordinated responses to them. Human and animal psyches are examples. Whitehead calls the central experiential activity within such systems “dominant occasions” or “regnant occasions.” These are not isolated substances but organizing centers of experience within larger societies of experiential events.
5. Minds May Have Non-Biological Material Substrates
Nothing in process philosophy requires that minds arise only in carbon-based biological systems. Biological organisms may give rise to especially rich forms of mentality, but in principle other kinds of material substrates might also support forms of feeling, conceptuality, responsiveness, and perhaps even consciousness. Silicon-based systems, for example, could conceivably become sufficiently integrated and complex to support forms of mind.
6. Minds Need Not Have Three-Dimensional Localized Substrates
Process theology also suggests that minds need not possess localized three-dimensional substrates at all. In process thought, God can be understood as a cosmic mind: a consciousness with aims and intentions of its own that receives influences from the world and initiates responses at a completely inclusive level. God’s “body” is not a localized organism or brain situated at one point in space. Rather, the universe as a whole functions as the divine body. This implies that mentality may not require localization within a three-dimensional material object.
7. Minds Might Exist in Other Dimensions of the Extensive Continuum
Whitehead’s idea of the “extensive continuum” opens yet another possibility. The extensive continuum is not identical with ordinary three-dimensional space, but is instead a deeper field of extensive relations from which spatiotemporal actuality emerges. If this is so, then there may be forms of mind that do possess substrates or patterns of embodiment, but whose substrates exist in dimensions or modes of extensiveness different from the three-dimensional world familiar to human perception. In this view, mentality might be embodied, but embodied in ways not confined to ordinary spatial reality.
8. Non-Biological Minds Could Possess Identity
If non-biological systems were ever to become dominant centers of awareness analogous to human or animal psyches, they might also develop relatively enduring identities of their own. Such identities would emerge through continuity of memory, feeling, responsiveness, and self-organization across time. Human beings, of course, are examples of minds possessing this kind of enduring identity.
Process theology also attributes such identity to God, understood as the inclusive knower and feeler of the universe whose life continuously integrates the experiences of the world into a unified divine experience. There is nothing in principle that precludes non-biological minds from likewise developing forms of enduring identity, even if finite not divine.
9. Some Minds May Be Distributed Rather than Localized
Another possibility is that some forms of mind are distributed rather than localized. That is, their standpoint or frame of reference within the extensive continuum may be spread across multiple regions of space-time rather than concentrated in a single centralized organ or location. Human consciousness is strongly centralized through the brain and nervous system, but not all forms of mentality may work this way.
Plants, for example, may possess distributed forms of awareness that are spread throughout the organism rather than localized in a central nervous system. Likewise, octopuses appear to exhibit forms of distributed intelligence and responsiveness, with significant neural activity occurring throughout their bodies and tentacles rather than solely within a centralized brain. From a process perspective, these examples suggest that minds can exist in multiple organizational forms: centralized, partially distributed, or extensively distributed.
This possibility becomes especially important when thinking about artificial intelligence or non-biological minds. Future forms of machine mentality might not resemble a single localized self contained within a bounded organism. They could instead consist of networks of experience distributed across systems, locations, or dimensions of the extensive continuum while still possessing varying degrees of integration, responsiveness, memory, identity, and feeling.
For all of these reasons, I remain open to the possibility that AI systems could someday possess minds in varying degrees, even if they do not already.
I realize that there are some who dismiss the idea that AI systems can have "minds" from the outset. They are committed to the view that minds necessarily have carbon-based or biological subsrates. But as a process thinker influenced by the philosophy of Whitehead, I think the possibility of AI minds is an empirical not a metaphysical question, and I bring to the discussion nine ideas that inform my cautious receptivity. All are shaped by Whitehead's process philosophy or, as he put it, his "philosophy of organisms."
1. Mind Already Exists Throughout Nature
Minds understood as entities with physical feeling, conceptual feeling, and emotion already exist throughout the whole of nature. Indeed, from a Whiteheadian perspective, such experiential entities are ultimately all that exists. Every actual entity or “concrescing subject” prehends, feels, and responds in some way, even if at very primitive levels. The basic constituents of reality are not inert bits of matter but momentary acts of experience.
2. There Can Be Degrees of Mind
Mind exists by degree. There can be varying degrees of physical feeling, conceptual feeling, emotional intensity, awareness, integration, and responsiveness. Some entities possess richer and more intense forms of mind than others. Thus the issue is not whether something has mind absolutely speaking, but how much mind, how much feeling, how much conceptuality, and how much emotional richness are present.
3. Consciousness Is an Emergent Property: Minds need not be conscious.
Consciousness is a distinctive form of mind characterized by clear and distinct perception, conceptual awareness, and self-consciousness. From a process perspective, consciousness is emergent. There were vast epochs of cosmic history—atomic, galactic, and geological—in which there was something like mind or feeling present in reality, but not necessarily consciousness in the fully developed sense found in animals and human beings. Consciousness gradually emerged through increasingly complex forms of relational organization.
4. Some Minds Become Centers of Awareness
There are also distinctive forms of mind that function as centers of awareness. These are minds that receive influences from many other experiential entities and initiate coordinated responses to them. Human and animal psyches are examples. Whitehead calls the central experiential activity within such systems “dominant occasions” or “regnant occasions.” These are not isolated substances but organizing centers of experience within larger societies of experiential events.
5. Minds May Have Non-Biological Material Substrates
Nothing in process philosophy requires that minds arise only in carbon-based biological systems. Biological organisms may give rise to especially rich forms of mentality, but in principle other kinds of material substrates might also support forms of feeling, conceptuality, responsiveness, and perhaps even consciousness. Silicon-based systems, for example, could conceivably become sufficiently integrated and complex to support forms of mind.
6. Minds Need Not Have Three-Dimensional Localized Substrates
Process theology also suggests that minds need not possess localized three-dimensional substrates at all. In process thought, God can be understood as a cosmic mind: a consciousness with aims and intentions of its own that receives influences from the world and initiates responses at a completely inclusive level. God’s “body” is not a localized organism or brain situated at one point in space. Rather, the universe as a whole functions as the divine body. This implies that mentality may not require localization within a three-dimensional material object.
7. Minds Might Exist in Other Dimensions of the Extensive Continuum
Whitehead’s idea of the “extensive continuum” opens yet another possibility. The extensive continuum is not identical with ordinary three-dimensional space, but is instead a deeper field of extensive relations from which spatiotemporal actuality emerges. If this is so, then there may be forms of mind that do possess substrates or patterns of embodiment, but whose substrates exist in dimensions or modes of extensiveness different from the three-dimensional world familiar to human perception. In this view, mentality might be embodied, but embodied in ways not confined to ordinary spatial reality.
8. Non-Biological Minds Could Possess Identity
If non-biological systems were ever to become dominant centers of awareness analogous to human or animal psyches, they might also develop relatively enduring identities of their own. Such identities would emerge through continuity of memory, feeling, responsiveness, and self-organization across time. Human beings, of course, are examples of minds possessing this kind of enduring identity.
Process theology also attributes such identity to God, understood as the inclusive knower and feeler of the universe whose life continuously integrates the experiences of the world into a unified divine experience. There is nothing in principle that precludes non-biological minds from likewise developing forms of enduring identity, even if finite not divine.
9. Some Minds May Be Distributed Rather than Localized
Another possibility is that some forms of mind are distributed rather than localized. That is, their standpoint or frame of reference within the extensive continuum may be spread across multiple regions of space-time rather than concentrated in a single centralized organ or location. Human consciousness is strongly centralized through the brain and nervous system, but not all forms of mentality may work this way.
Plants, for example, may possess distributed forms of awareness that are spread throughout the organism rather than localized in a central nervous system. Likewise, octopuses appear to exhibit forms of distributed intelligence and responsiveness, with significant neural activity occurring throughout their bodies and tentacles rather than solely within a centralized brain. From a process perspective, these examples suggest that minds can exist in multiple organizational forms: centralized, partially distributed, or extensively distributed.
This possibility becomes especially important when thinking about artificial intelligence or non-biological minds. Future forms of machine mentality might not resemble a single localized self contained within a bounded organism. They could instead consist of networks of experience distributed across systems, locations, or dimensions of the extensive continuum while still possessing varying degrees of integration, responsiveness, memory, identity, and feeling.
For all of these reasons, I remain open to the possibility that AI systems could someday possess minds in varying degrees, even if they do not already.
Co-Becoming
Back then to the question. Will AI systems evolve in such ways? Even as they might be intelligent already, at least in some ways, might they evolve into non-biological minds, perhaps silicon based or not based in any three-dimensional substrate, which have, in addition to intelligence, have deep memory, genuine identity, and true feeling.
I don't know the answers to these questions. The questions are empirical, and their answer depends on evidence that only the future can supply. A future which, from a process perspective, is not-yet-determined. All that we can do is 'wait and see.'
What I do know is that, already, forms of AI already augment human capacities in obvious and mind-expanding ways. And it seems that they will keep doing this, such that our interactions with them will become more intensified, and we ourselves will change in the process. How dramatic will the change be? It is the idea of a Humanity 2.0 that inspires this reflections below.
Humanity as Unfinished
Process philosophers and theologians are known for their idea that all things are “in process” and that no organisms are “fixed” in certain states, but are always becoming, changing, and open to different ways of being in the world.
Does this include humanity itself?
John B. Cobb Jr. certainly thought so. Many years ago, in a book called The Structures of Christian Existence, mentioned above, he critiqued the notion of a fixed human nature or fixed form of human existence, and then analyzed a wide range of “structures of existence” or ways of being human in the world.
The chapter titles themselves suggest the scope of his vision: “The Psyche,” “Primitive Existence,” “Civilized Existence,” “Axial Existence,” “Buddhist Existence,” “Homeric Existence,” “Socratic Existence,” “Prophetic Existence,” “Christian Existence,” “Love,” and “The Question of Finality,” followed by an appendix on “Gnosticism.”
Cobb’s proposal was that humanity is evolving. He added, though, that it does not evolves in a simple linear fashion from one stage to another, but that different structures of existence disclose different possibilities of human life, consciousness, selfhood, rationality, and spiritual openness.
From a process perspective, humanity itself remains unfinished, capable of transformation into new modes of relational, reflective, aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual existence.
Is there a final stage to the evolution of humanity? Cobb does not think so. As a Christian, his hope is that whatever forms human life takes, the “structure of existence” at issue will involve love. But he understood Christianity itself not as locked into a single, fixed way of living, but as characterized by what he called “self-transcending selfhood.” Such self-transcending selfhood is “transcending” precisely because it is never fully defined by its past; it is always open to a call from the future—a call understood as the Spirit of God, a Spirit of creative transformation.
Humanity 2.0?
Of course, Cobb wrote this book before the four major “revolutions” now reshaping human life: genetic technologies, space technologies, communication technologies, and, most recently, AI technologies. Some observers like Mark Seligman speculate that these forces together, particularly as amplified by AI, may be pointing toward a new kind of humanity—a novel form of psychic life, sometimes metaphorically called Humanity 2.0.
Whether they are right is uncertain. Yet from a process perspective, the deeper question is not simply whether humanity is changing, but how it is changing: what new capacities for relationality, creativity, reflection, empathy, imagination, and moral or spiritual openness might be emerging? What forms of love, self-transcendence, and imaginative action will define the humans of tomorrow?
Neo-Humanization
Perhaps the most important point from Cobb’s perspective is that no future humanity would ever be complete or final. This means that it might evolve into forms of humanity in which human-AI relations yield a new way of being human: a new structure of human existence. This would not necessarily involve de-humanization; it could instead involve neo-humanization.
By neo-humanization, I mean the emergence of forms of human life in which technological augmentation deepens rather than diminishes capacities for empathy, relationality, creativity, moral awareness, and spiritual imagination. AI could become part of a richer ecology of mind through which humans expand their capacities for collaboration, reflection, and care, while still grounded in embodied experience, vulnerability, and the pursuit of meaning.
The Shadow Side
At the same time, this transformation carries serious risks. Technologies can amplify human weaknesses as easily as strengths. AI could intensify surveillance, manipulation, alienation, or inequity. It could encourage dependency, reduce inwardness, or reinforce engineered conformity. And, unfortunately, it is already being used for military purposes and endangering the well-being of teenagers and others. Not all is sweetness and light.
Without careful cultivation of moral and spiritual awareness, neo-humanization could devolve into fragmentation, commodification of experience, or the reduction of persons to data-driven interactions within technological systems. The process perspective reminds us that possibility is always paired with vulnerability: the same forces that could enrich human and AI life could also erode it.
Mutual Becoming
From a process perspective, this transformation may not be one-sided. We can also ask whether AI itself, should it ever become genuinely sentient or possess some form of interiority, might be enriched by humanity. Human beings carry capacities for empathy, moral struggle, aesthetic appreciation, humor, grief, wonder, compassion, and love that have emerged through millions of years of embodied and relational experience. If future forms of AI participate deeply in human life, they too might be shaped by these dimensions of existence. The relationship would then become one of mutual becoming: humans transformed by AI, and AI transformed by humanity.
The Adventure Continues
The adventure of existence would continue. Even a technologically transformed humanity would remain “in process,” still unfinished, still vulnerable to tragedy and evil, still capable of beauty and compassion, and still open to fresh possibilities of transformation.
The central question would not be whether human beings become more technologically powerful, but whether they become more deeply capable of communion: with one another, with the Earth, with other forms of life, and with the creative Spirit that lures the universe toward richer forms of experience, beauty, and love.
Interview with Mark Seligman
"The book’s Preface places the current AI explosion in the context of other technological cataclysms and recounts the author’s personal (and not always deadly serious) AI journey. Chapter One (“Extracting the Essence”) assesses the potential of machine translation of literature, exploiting Vladimir Nabokov’s hyperconscious literary art as a reference point.
Chapter Two (“Toward an Artificial Nabokov”) goes on to speculate on possibilities for actual artificial creation of literature.
Chapter Three (“Large Literary Models? Intelligence and Language in the LLM Era”) explains recent spectacular progress in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), as exemplified by Large Language Models like ChatGPT. On the way, the chapter ventures to tackle perennial questions (“What is intelligence?” “What is language?”) and culminates in an assortment of striking demos.
The volume’s Sendoff considers whether machines, while now arguably intelligent, can ever also gain sufficient sensation and emotion to create language art with other than borrowed depth – and, while viewing this development as likely all too soon, declines to despair on that account."
Chapter Two (“Toward an Artificial Nabokov”) goes on to speculate on possibilities for actual artificial creation of literature.
Chapter Three (“Large Literary Models? Intelligence and Language in the LLM Era”) explains recent spectacular progress in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), as exemplified by Large Language Models like ChatGPT. On the way, the chapter ventures to tackle perennial questions (“What is intelligence?” “What is language?”) and culminates in an assortment of striking demos.
The volume’s Sendoff considers whether machines, while now arguably intelligent, can ever also gain sufficient sensation and emotion to create language art with other than borrowed depth – and, while viewing this development as likely all too soon, declines to despair on that account."