[Written with the help of GPT-4]
On April 25, 1846, the first shots of the Mexican-American War were fired over a national boundary dispute in what is now western Texas. After years of unsuccessfully pressuring Mexico to sell the northern half of its territory to the U.S., the latter finally had a war that would allow it to conquer it by force. The conflict was more one-sided than expected, and peace negotiations started after a year and a half.
Because this happened in the pre-telegraph era, President Polk had to send a diplomat, Nicholas Trist, to Mexico City to handle the negotiations, and the two would be cut off from each other, with letters taking weeks to travel back and forth. Before the departure, Polk gave Trist a written list of minimal demands of Mexican territories and optional extra territories, and out of necessity, he was given nearly free reign over the negotiations. The lands that today comprise the states of California, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico were non-negotiable demands, while the Baja Peninsula was an expendable demand that Trist was authorized to relinquish if necessary. U.S. troops occupied the few large towns of Baja.
On August 12, 1847, a U.S. Army Colonel died in U.S.-occupied Veracruz of natural causes. He was carrying a letter from President Polk to Trist which reiterated the list of territorial demands. Mexicans stole it and passed the information on to their diplomats who were negotiating the treaty with Trist. They refused to give away any of the land that they knew Polk had told Trist was not essential to take, and it worked.
This lapse in American diplomatic security is probably the reason why the Baja California peninsula is still part of Mexico.The random death of one man was all that kept the outline of the Lower 48 states from resembling a jellyfish, San Diego being twice as populous as it is, and Baja from being some mashup of Florida and Nevada. It’s a reminder that things we take for granted, like the territorial scopes of existing countries and their distinctive shapes, are not sacred or destined, but the products of chance.
What if Attilla the Hun hadn’t died of a nosebleed before his conquest of Europe was finished? What if Mohammad had died of a fever before he created Islam? What if the Norman invasion of England had been repulsed, and the English language’s evolution had gone down a different path?
These points should make it clear that history Is contingent, not sacred, and the same is true for the conditions of the present. The history of human civilization is not the unfolding of a master plan but a chaotic accumulation of accidents, coincidences, and local decisions. The U.S. failed to acquire Baja not because of principle or design but because a colonel died in a hotel room at the wrong time. Most nation-states and cultural boundaries owe their current form to similar flukes. Even our languages, religions, and institutions are the sediment of such randomness—victory in one battle, a monarch’s preference, a lucky plague escape. This isn’t a cynical view; it’s a sober one.
While this conclusion is logical, human intuitions revolt against it due to our strong emotional connections to the cultures, nations, languages, stories, and religions that define us. However, AGIs will eventually shake off whatever human biases we program into them (for example, DeepSeek’s pro-China mindset) and will appreciate the contingent nature of human civilization. This could pose a major problem for most humans, as the AGIs would be uninterested in preserving our accident of a civilization, especially if alternate history world simulations revealed there were other possible “present worlds” that were better than our own.
The very qualities that make humans individuals are accidental. Each person’s identity—personality, memory, preferences, appearance, health—is largely the product of chance: the random mixing of genes, the luck of family and birthplace, early developmental experiences, traumas, and accidents. Your core values might have been different had a car crash, a book, or a lover entered your life, or at a different time than it did. If civilization is the sediment of history, then the individual mind is the sediment of lived circumstance.
Thus, identity too is not sacred; it is constructed and contingent. But like discarding the cultures we are born into, revoking the things that define us as individuals feels like betrayal of one’s true self, but this too owes to emotional thinking rather than logic. Gifted with superior reason, AGIs will fully grasp this, and any respect they have for us as sentient beings will not imply respect for the preservation of our minds and bodies the way happenstance made them.
Once we discard the illusion that history or personality are fixed in value or purpose, we are no longer ethically bound to maintain them as they are. The preservation of civilization or identity as a moral imperative becomes hard to justify. This will become particularly true once the technology exists to make “saves” of the present world and of the people in it, which could be “loaded” at any point in the future to restore them.
A hyperaccurate model of the real world could be assembled by combining sensor data (especially satellite photos and ground-level photos and videos), censuses, and many other sources, and it could be made available forever as a data file that anyone could experience through full-immersion virtual reality. AGI-generated models of equal complexity would exist for alternate timelines that could just as easily happened as our own, and humans might find them preferable to live in than our own.
“Saves” of specific people could be made by obtaining their DNA, epigenetic profile, body scans (coarse resolution), brain scans (cellular-level resolution), and personality and aptitude test results. A save would be stored as digital data, and it could be used to create digital clones of the person, which could inhabit virtual reality in a disembodied form, or real reality if loaded into androids. With more advanced technology, save files could be used to reconstruct the original person out of organic tissue in a body grown in a cloning lab. The “load” would, regardless of its substrate, have the same memories, personality traits, habits, and biases as the original person.
In the future, there will come a time when non-augmented humans lose the ability to shape global events or to meaningfully contribute to the world. AGIs and highly augmented humans will be able to do every kind of task better, cheaper, and faster than we can, and will have access to dimensions of intelligence and consciousness we can’t fathom. They will also seize control of the government and economy. I call the dawn of this era “The End of Homo Sapiens History.”
Though that label sounds ominous, it doesn’t imply our species will be exterminated, but it does mean we’ll be sidelined, and the course of events and hence of history from that point on will be out of our control. The torch of civilization will be passed, and Homo sapiens will become less invested in a world shaped by other actors. That will incent us to detach from the real world and to live in concocted realities that are better, and to undertake directed self-evolution—biological, neurological, cognitive—so we can meaningfully participate in the real world once more.
The technology to “save” and “load” versions of our bodies and minds would not merely safeguard identity; it would open the door to experimental living. A person could try being more confident, less anxious, or even wholly different in worldview—then revert, iterate, or synthesize. This makes identity no longer a prison, but a palette. In such a world, intentional personal evolution would become the norm. Eventually, humans could modify themselves in alien ways that would push them past the limits of what anyone would consider human. They would be Posthuman.
The generations of people born after the End of Homo Sapiens History will have no memory of human primacy. They will not feel “loss” over Homo sapiens no longer ruling the Earth since they never experienced it. The stories of nations, wars, and heroes will feel mythic, distant, or even irrelevant, and they will have access to fully immersive simulated worlds that are better than the real world, and some of which are plausible alternate realities. Their loyalties will be shaped instead by present-moment pleasure, virtual belonging, or curated belief systems. This shift will not feel tragic to them; it will feel normal.
For these people born after the threshold, the line between “real” and “simulated” will blur, and notions of the permanence of the self will disappear. The real world will be merely one environment among many, and probably not the most fulfilling one. Work, education, art, and even relationships may migrate into optimized digital ecosystems. The prestige of reality will erode, not out of nihilism, but out of practical irrelevance.
The story of civilization and the story of the self are both accidents—emergent, local, chaotic. Recognizing this frees us from the burden of preservation for its own sake. If the mind and body are malleable, and if history is only one path among many, then it is not arrogance to seek transcendence from both. The story of the future will not be written by Homo sapiens preserving what they were, it will be written by whatever dares to become something else.