Is being Born Digital a Signpost for Human Evolution?

Human evolution did not stop with the final development of our organs several hundred thousand years ago. In a post-biological way, human evolution has continued ever since, deep into the cognitive and higher reasoning space. Twentieth-century historian Will Durant described post-biological evolution as the rise of new human capabilities such as the creation of speech and practicing agriculture, as well as mental capacities including the development of social organisation, education, and science. Since Durant’s time, the spread of the digital world has been added to this list. Much like human evolution, nimble digital players that drive technology evolution like Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia reign over the dinosaurs of the petroleum industry. Today, the market values businesses that are able to evolve and adapt based on our society’s obsession with the virtual world. Our need to have all the world’s knowledge at the tap of a finger has changed the way we communicate, learn, and create. “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” - Albert Einstein In this digital landscape, a person’s value is directly correlated to their digital literacy and their ability to connect with the wider world, which broadly splits into two camps: people that are ‘digitally native’ are those that grew up using technology, especially during their formative years, and consider interacting with virtual media as a second language, whereas ‘digital immigrants’ have not had this opportunity and instead have had to adapt to the new technological advancements. The term ‘digitally native’ generally refers to people born after 1985, or the ‘Millennial’, ‘Generation Z', and most recent ‘Generation Alpha’ cohorts. We often see them multi-tasking using technology and favouring interactive modes of learning where consistent feedback serves as their reward mechanism. The other group, ‘digital immigrants’ are those who grew up before the invention of the internet and have had to learn, at different levels of competence, how to interact with the new digital world. Recent research recognises the divide between ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants', where brain scans showed marked differences in how these groups of people imbibe and retain information, learn new material, and create novelty. Although the human brain itself may not have changed physically, it is now understood that the very pathways and thinking patterns that define us have evolved, lighting up different parts of cognition when accessing search engines, social engines, and mobile phone apps. Data showed that digital natives’ brains were more active when scrolling through a webpage, while the second group exhibited similar activity when reading printed text in a physical book. With a vast, inconsistent volume of digital media so readily available, it is tempting to label many young children as ‘lazy’ or ‘unfocused’ due to their seemingly alien practice of multi-tasking when it comes to learning, be it AirPods blasting music whilst answering OneNote sample questions or watching a series of educational TikToks and Youtube videos prior to attempting any new task. This has led to some common ideologies that this new generation is devolving as they consume content so easily, with numerous scholarly articles citing the dangers of digital media impacting the focus of young learners. However, much like the invention of radio took forty years to reach mass penetration (a hundred million users), twenty years for television, a year for Facebook, and two months for ChatGPT, it could be argued that these digital natives will evolve at a more rapid pace than the previous generations, with a global crowd-sourced knowledge pool accelerating creativity and changing the rate at which we communicate and grow as digital tribes today. “I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.” - Isaac Asimov Much like Darwin’s position on survival, the adaptation of these digital evolutionary ‘body parts’ and the adaptability to this change will allow humanity to reach new potentials. Physical geographies no longer force us apart; the expansion of virtual citizenships and global digital currencies will aid us to behave as a single evolved tribe - eliminating poverty, fear, and illiteracy. Instead, we choose to focus on responsibility for the planet and making humanity behave towards each other with the utmost respect and compassion.