There are fears about how the rise of super-intelligent AI will impact humanity, but Elon Musk seems to believe that this is how things were always meant to be.
Elon Musk has said that humanity could be a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence. “As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” he posted on X.
In computing, a bootloader is a small program that initializes a more complex system, such as an operating system. Without the bootloader, the OS wouldn’t start. Musk seems to be implying that humans serve a similar function—our intelligence has allowed us to develop technology, and ultimately, we are creating AI that could surpass human intelligence.
Musk is suggesting that biological intelligence (humans) might just be a temporary phase in the grand scheme of evolution. Once we create AI that surpasses us, it could take over as the dominant form of intelligence—much like how humans replaced previous species as the most intelligent beings on Earth.
It’s a provocative idea. The conventional wisdom is that humanity is the pinnacle of evolution, and life evolved for millions of years to get us here — it’s now up for us to explore the universe, and look to grow our footprint. But Musk seems to be saying that humanity’s purpose could’ve just been to create superintelligence, and now it’s up to this superintelligence to take things from here. Humanity, in this sense, was just a step in the overall evolution cycle, and is meant to give way to superintelligence. It’s a sobering thought, and one that must be considered as we rapidly create digital beings that are far smarter and more capable than we are.