Digital Evolution is becoming an increasingly relevant phenomenon in our lives. AI systems, such as ChatGPT, are rapidly integrating into our personal and professional lives and they are shaking up the plans of corporations and governments all over the world. This is an unstoppable freight train and just a part of what we can call Digital Evolution. It will undoubtedly be the defining force of our future. Like it or not… and you don’t have to like it.

If you look up Digital Evolution, you’ll see that the generic definition is about how digital systems change and get better over time. While this is true, it’s missing the bigger picture. And that is, that Digital Evolution exists as an extension of human evolution. Humans don’t really evolve biologically anymore, certainly not enough to noticeably change our society, we evolve culturally and especially in the past decades: digitally. But driving the changes and improvements of digital systems is the exact same life and death struggle for survival that plants and animals have.

If we saw beaver dams changing over time, we could call that “beaver damn evolution”, but we should also realize that it is actually the beavers that are looking to evolve.

Digital Systems do 3 things for us:

Nr 1: Group us together

Nr 2: work for us (maybe say more about this: how organisms are just a machine to do work for genes, that is they get the stuff you need to make copies of yourself. That’s all work is, spending energy to get back more energy)

Thirdly: they represent us to help us forge alliances

Before I expand on those points, we need to look at how we got here, because the big picture will help us see the present details for what they really are.  

Let me see if I can make everyone mad in the next few minutes by summarizing human evolution.

Biological Evolution

Here goes: all life is about self-replicating molecules. Plants, animals, and us. Stop now if you don’t understand that, or if you know it but need some time to let it sink in before we move on.

Ok, for those of you still with me. Shall we move on? The unit of replication is the gene, not the individual, therefore it is genes that want to self-replicate and this drive is behind the creations of all species and all action and change in the living world. That distinction means we aren’t solely out for ourselves, we are doing what we do for our genes, who are definitely in our family members and also to a good extent in our friends and community members. All living things are bound by this paradigm. And living organisms are competing and cooperating with each other, and of course changing shape, all in order to pass on their genes more than others. That’s biological evolution.

Cultural Evolution

Now we humans, have a layer on top of biological evolution. One that itself evolved as we needed to grow into larger groups. That layer is Cultural Evolution. This is where we really broke off from the other animals. Culture is what changed the trajectory of our species. Culture encompasses all the things we collectively know and create outside of our biology. You can imagine that those cultural artifacts live their own lives alongside us but can live on after we die. And when those bits of culture change to help us get better biological results, that’s cultural evolution.

Cultural Evolution achieved 3 things – the same 3 things I just mentioned about digital evolution: it brought people into groups to work together (the glaring example of this is religion), gave us knowledge – which is really just helping us work better, and it got others to ally with us in our attempts to pass on our genes. Alliances are absolutely integral to our species. Tigers don’t care what other tigers think of them, but humans care what other humans think. Our social nature is rooted at our core, and we need alliances to survive like we need water. An example of an alliance created through culture: Think of Paul McCartney: we all love and support Paul McCartney because he did something cultural when he wrote Yesterday. Paul is a biological creature trying to pass on his genes, just like he would have been 200K years ago. And Yesterday is a cultural creature that he created to help him do that. It worked! We give him money, if we see him, we say nice things and ask to carry his bags. If he enters a packed restaurant without a reservation, he’ll still get a table. He has had great success in cultural evolution.

Yesterday has done those three things I mentioned. It brings people together in groups. The whole Beatle enterprise was formed out of businessmen, musicians, musical producers and engineers. Like a religion: they believed in the Beatles and what they were doing and then started to work together to make the vision a reality. They all were better off doing so. Secondly, It improved Paul’s knowledge of music but also: other musicians learned from the song. Some of them covered it and made their own version which made them some money and Paul got some royalties too. Like all creations: it was work, but it produced something of value, – in the form of the song itself. If you play music, you can imagine that music, at its core is information. What notes to play and how to play them. And now this information is out there in the world helping us do work better. The new knowledge that we collectively share of the chord progression, the lyrics and vocals, the style, and the arrangement makes humanity ever so slightly more powerful. And thirdly, it got many people to ally with Paul: Beatles fans. In a sense, they now work part-time for Paul – spending some of their time and money on Yesterday, which eventually makes its way back to the biological creator: Paul McCartney.

Imagine 2 societies: they are exactly the same in every way, but the one society has created the song Yesterday. They are better off than the one who didn’t create Yesterday and this is exactly what evolution favors. Paul should get the benefits of Yesterday more than the other members of the society, but this creation is now independent of Paul, living its own life, and will live on and continue to benefit society after Paul dies. It will continue to group people together, to enrich our knowledge base and help us make more songs, and it will represent Paul McCartney favorably for centuries to come to the benefit of his children and grandchildren.  

Digital Evolution

And now we have digital systems sitting on top of culture. It could only come after cultural evolution because cultural evolution created the knowledge to make digital systems. So, Biological evolution progresses when genes are altered, either through sexual reproduction or mutation. That means: once a generation. Cultural evolution progresses when thoughts, ideas, and knowledge are altered by humans. This can and does happen many times in the course of our lifetimes. Digital systems use the combination of processing power and digitized information to do those things. And their products evolve when digital systems alter/improve our thoughts and ideas which were converted into bits and bytes.

The 3 activities of digital systems.

1. Group us together. While you can create a digital system by yourself and be the sole user of that digital system, more powerful systems are created and maintained by a group of people. Anyone in tech can tell you that when you start to build a system, one of the considerations you take into account is the quality of the tech community involved in a system. You need a database for your system, so you think of which database has a large, active community. Need to choose a coding language? Which one has a large, stable number of people proficient in the language that you can tap into. What’s the point in choosing a programming language that no one knows how to code in. You won’t be able to hire anyone. So, Inherent in the creation of a new database or a new programming language is the marketing you’ll need to get other people involved. And again… just like a religion, people join up with one or the other languages. The 2 main corporate programming languages of the last 20 years have been Java and .NET. Programmers take sides and usually choose one or the other to invest their time in. They form groups, they go to meetings, they join forums online. And yes…they make fun of the other side and consider themselves superior. When they form these groups, they subconsciously hope they choose the better side: that is, the side that will result in the best evolutionary outcome. This is subconsciously why you choose one religion over another, why you choose The Beatles over the Stones and why you choose to use an Apple iPhone over a Samsung Android. We want to be on the winning team. This is digital systems forming groups.

Nr 2: do work for us. They will take the thoughts created in Cultural Evolution  and digitize them into what we then call data. Then computers can further augment that data, analyze it, and distribute it. Our success as a species has come from this process. We were once a bunch of idiots in the wilderness, living hand to mouth, and then we started to share information with each other. We had always been working, but now we were working better, and our numbers exploded. That is: in the game of evolution, we were winning. Digital systems will do the same with regards to helping us work better.

Third: digital systems will represent us (much like Yesterday represents Paul McCartney) and distribute that representation in an attempt to grow our alliances. Think of how hundreds of years ago, you had to go to see Mozart. For his time, he was popular and he had supporters, but nothing compared to what Taylor Swift has. The difference is not the quality of music, but the technology she has at her disposal to represent her being and distribute that representation. The artists of today get to digitize their works and distribute them to billions of people in an instant. When they do, and when their works garner favor, they have ultimately supported their genes… their biology. When people talk about the Attention Economy, this is what they are talking about. We have had this a hundred thousand years ago when we couldn’t write, and we’ve had it before computers, and now he have it with computers that provide more power to those who use it.

Just as with Cultural Evolution and of course with Biological Evolution, the ultimate motivation is gene proliferation. And as we go up the ladder our efforts toward this goal become less direct and potentially ineffective. Paul didn’t pass on his genes when he wrote Yesterday, it only helped support his genes. His genes of course were directly passed on when he had his kids.

Digital Evolution will be an even more indirect way to pass on our genes. We put in effort in creating a digital system, but then again, we needed help from many, many other people to create it, and if it is successful, then somewhere indirectly, incrementally we (those involved) have increased our chances of passing on our genes. So why bother? Slight improvements make all the difference in evolution. And even though the results may be indirect and incremental, the drive is strong and creates huge movements in society to work towards building these digital systems.

The future will bring us more and more digital systems. They will grow in complexity as they try to outpace competitors. But they will also need to grow in compatibility as they cooperate with other digital systems. In a sense, this is simply a mirror of ourselves: our thoughts grew more complex and our personalities had to adapt to be more cooperative so we could work better together with others. With each year digital systems will be smarter and they will distribute information better, that is they will be more connected and integrated.

The landscape of digital systems will look like the landscape of species in the living world: a small number of prominent, large systems and thousands of smaller, less powerful systems – all in a spectrum of size and capabilities. Take that same comparison and you’ll see we’ve already done something similar in Cultural Evolution: we made languages – some more prominent, some smaller, some more powerful – but all of them have evolved together – some merged, some split, but all of them empower us to pass on our genes better and represent those genes. Just try telling a Frenchman to stop speaking French. It is so welded to his being that it would feel like genocide to him and the genes he represents.

The same will happen with digital systems. They will represent us so powerfully and mean so much to us, that we will value them as much as we value ourselves. They will be the next vehicle to help us evolve.

What does this mean for you?

Many of us, myself included, are a bit hesitant when it comes to digital systems. We might like gadgets here and there, but we recognize that the more time we spend in the digital world, the less happy we are. Our brains are made for thousands and thousands of years ago, so as uncomfortable as the world seems to have been without houses, without cars, without iPhones, and with only a small group of people, it’s what we are wired for. But, statistically, there is simply no escaping our future of close collaboration with digital systems. They will be more and more an extension of us, dare I say a part of us – like our arms and legs are a part of us. You’ll have to push yourself to learn about them, invest time in using them, and make them work for you. It’ll feel unnatural, but as we’ve seen, the better we do in life, the more free time we get and I can only recommend that you spend that free time with your close relationships, in a very green, quiet, and natural surrounding. Digital evolution is where we are going, but let’s never lose sight of where we come from.  

That was Digital Evolution. I hope that clears things up and gives you an extra bit of context as you work with digital systems and evolve digitally for many years to come.