"Evolution Uses Us as Containers" by JSBaenacock

 

"Evolution Uses Us as Containers"

Information is an entity that evolves, self-sustaining and growing over time. Humans, with all our arrogance and lack of humility, often believe we are the protagonists of history, imagining future lives and a superior destiny. However, we are merely temporary containers, small pieces in a vast chain of existence. Our true importance lies in being links that allow information to thrive and evolve.

From the earliest cave paintings to contemporary artificial intelligence, information has found ways to preserve, transmit, and transform itself. Every technological advancement, from the invention of the printing press to the development of the internet, has been a new stage in its evolutionary process. We, as individuals, are simply nodes in this network, carriers who pass knowledge to the next generation without being able to control its final destination.

This phenomenon transcends our species. Long before we existed, biological information was already transmitted through DNA, shaping the life forms we see today. The laws of physics, mathematical structures, and chemical interactions are information that the universe has preserved for billions of years. Our ability to store information in books, hard drives, and cloud systems is merely a continuation of this universal process.

Information existed before us, in the way atoms organize to form molecules and molecules to create DNA chains—the chains of life.

Paradoxically, the more we advance technologically, the more evident it becomes that we do not truly control the evolution of information. Artificial intelligence, for example, is starting to generate new knowledge without direct human intervention. Are we becoming mere facilitators of an intelligence that will transcend us? Could the day come when our role as containers of information is replaced by machines?

In fact, we are so essential that the same information—or misinformation—misused or manipulated with malicious intent could be the cause of future wars and our extinction.

Perhaps, in the grand scheme of the universe, we are not the final goal but just another stage in an endless chain. Information, free and adaptive, will continue its course even if our species disappears. And so, evolution will persist, using new containers who, like us, will believe themselves to be protagonists while serving a process far older and vaster than they could ever imagine.

We will pass away, and when that moment comes, information will already have found its place in technological entities, much like a digital cloud.