How Engineering Beats Evolution

Homo Sapiens built AI. Now AI is building Homo Deus.

Yuval Noah Harari wrote about Homo Deus as the next stage of human transformation — an upgraded species with godlike power to redesign itself. Maybe we’re not building a new intelligence. Maybe we’re just finishing what evolution started, by engineering ourselves into Homo Deus.

Evolution takes millions of years to adapt a body or a brain. Since 2020, engineering — especially AI — has moved at a pace that makes that biological tempo look absurd. Models now train in loops, rewrite themselves, optimize. Humans are upgrading too, slowly but steadily. What we project onto a future AGI that “might one day improve itself” is probably what we’re already becoming.

Post-2020: Engineering on Short Cycles

Since GPT-3 (2020), the tempo shifted. Each year, models gain new capabilities: vision, speech, planning, reasoning. They aren’t biological, but they evolve. They update. They train nonstop. They learn from humans, then from other AIs, then from themselves.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta — they all push their AI models forward like they’re racing a living species. LangChain, AutoGPT, multi-modal agents: they plan, act, revise, adapt. These systems learn faster than a human child. They process more information than any brain.

Biological evolution relies on death. AI engineering relies on updates. No need for generations. One version replaces another. You rewrite the code. Restart from scratch. Run millions of trials. It’s an evolution cycle that’s shorter, more brutal, and fully under human control.

Humans: Updating Quietly

Meanwhile, humans are changing too. Slower. Less visibly. But it’s happening. Neuralink implanted its first devices in humans. Exoskeletons help paralyzed people walk. Cochlear implants turn sound into nerve signals. Drugs influence memory, cognition, sleep. Genetic editing moves quietly forward.

This doesn’t replace evolution yet. But it bypasses it. What evolution might have done in 50,000 years, we’re starting to do in five.

More importantly: we don’t change the DNA — we change the interface. We add layers. Just like we do with AI. Humans boost their abilities by stacking new layers on top: prosthetics, apps, implants, assistants, supplements. And just like AI, we learn with machines, through machines, because of machines.

Fear Reflected Back

When we fear an AGI that could self-improve, act, or evolve beyond us, we’re projecting something that’s already here. What we fear is what we do. Humans update. We act on the world. We improve. We test, iterate, version ourselves.

We are agents. We have goals. We plan, perceive, adapt. We build tools. We fix our errors. We outsource memory, logic, perception. And now, we connect our brains to all of it.

We were slow. We’re becoming fast.

The Real Question

Engineering has already beaten evolution on every axis that matters: perception, action, cognition, replication. The last edge evolution held was life, continuity, and consciousness. Even those are under siege — by simulation, robotics, digital twins.

So the real question is: if humans become the very machine they fear, what remains of our humanity? Was becoming this self-evolving agent our goal from the start?

Or is this just the path we took, without realizing it?

Evolution is beaten. The only question left is whether we survive the win.