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Maybe smaller animals have more efficiently evolved so their brains don't have much 'unnecessary' space. If you google about human brain sizes, it seems many sources say they've been shrinking for 3000+ years (though some sources say otherwise). If human brain sizes are shrinking, and presumably we've been getting more intelligent over the past 3000+ years, then maybe we're getting rid of 'unnecessary' space. Though maybe a large brain with 'unnecessary' space is necessary for having the excess capacity needed to develop higher level intelligence. But as we evolve and converge upon the most efficient brain size (which might be 400g?), we'll essentially become frozen as a species. We might even be more prone to devolve than anything else, as various groups don't 'use' particular parts of their brain.
Maybe a lot of our brain capacity was geared towards surviving in the natural world, used for religious/spiritual connections, socializing at a level beyond our comprehension, being connected to our environment. In our modern world, as we see the breakdown of families and people becoming more and more introverted, maybe we'll see the part of our brain that deals with socialization begin to shrink. Maybe it already has. Notice how the average Very Online type seems to be incapable of understanding sarcasm (even in person), they take entertainment media and jokes literally, they need to express their feelings vocally and require others to, seemingly unable to pick up on subtle cues.
Maybe westerners are going to lose that, our brains will shrink in a few more generations as we 'evolve'. We'll feel really smart since we can use our words to communicate, while the savages in far off lands read facial expressions like tea leaves. "lol, these idiots think they can tell when someone is angry, lying, happy, just from looking at their face. Just like bigots think they can tell who is a man or woman by sight. How can anybody possibly know what's going on in my head without me specifically telling them? Mind reading is pseudoscience." Then when those savages seem to be able to actually read minds, the enlightened will get spooked, call them witches, and burn them at the stake.
Kind of like how psychopaths seem to be able to manipulate people, as if they can see things the average person cannot. They can play people like an instrument. But maybe they just have an older brain, with a capacity to socialize at a higher level, and to them the rest of us seem like retarded children crying over spilled milk. We call it lack of empathy, but from their perspective, our ordinary problems are far below their horizon.
This is a highly speculative tangent that probably makes me sound like a kook, but I always think about this scenario in the context of AI and automation - tasks that would select for fitness in humans are increasingly being outsourced to external agents. Let's say we stumble upon AGI and eventually ASI, and somehow we manage to make a "friendly" one and let it take over the tasks which are relevant to the functioning of society, like the creation and distribution of resources, policing and maintaining peace, etc. What selection pressures would exist to protect us from the accumulation of deleterious mutations in the genome and suffering a severe decline in our physical prowess and cognitive faculties? Even mate choice won't necessarily maintain these things, these behaviours and preferences can and will be disposed of when your child will fare equally well regardless of if they are a genius or a handicapped moron. All you really need to be is a prolific replicator, capability of your offspring be damned.
I suppose if we're at that point we'd likely also have the ability to genetically modify ourselves, which would probably allow us to stave that off indefinitely. But still, it's an unsettling idea that the traits we possess are conditional on them having use, and that a world where we no longer fight for existence might in and of itself pose a different, more insidious type of threat.
This will take time, and probably we will enter next phase of Malthusian cycle before these self-enforcing behaviors drop.
There are two general points of contention I have with this.
1: ASI would result in huge leaps and bounds in technology that would push the Malthusian condition very far out into our future. For example, we would not be restricted to our resources and energy on Earth. There's always the rest of our solar system, and huge amounts of energy could be harnessed via Dyson swarm. Additionally, an ASI might crack the problem of interstellar travel - manned trips to our neighbouring star systems don't seem undoable for an ASI, and we could spread outward from there. A Malthusian condition would certainly rear its head eventually (especially considering that our reachable universe is limited), but this would take a very long time, likely enough for humans to radically change before we hit it.
2: When we hit a Malthusian limit, in this case this doesn't necessarily mean that the loss of traits just stops. It just means that the ASI will have to engage in some form of population control to manage it. That doesn't change the fact that the AI as caretaker is distributing us all of our resources without any work necessary on our part, and policing us to make sure we don't steal from each other's allotments so we can get more than our fair share (presumably that would be undesirable). This essentially makes it so that the pressures that maintain physical and cognitive ability as well as mate preferences based on physical and cognitive ability are now gone. Some of us might not get to breed under a Malthusian condition, or we might all breed less, but in this scenario the ones that do breed are likely not doing so because of their intelligence or capability. It doesn't effectively screen out the deleterious mutations that cause loss of functioning.
state-issuedASI-mandated girlfriends?More options
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