Alternate hypothesis:<p>Life on this planet has evolved from primitive organisms whose only goal is to propagate through spacetime (in time = survive, in space = reproduce), as this is the de facto only initial goal you may encounter serendipitously, when the trait we judge is... in fact propagation though spacetime (i.e. to exist, you need to know how to keep existing).<p>In the quest of adapting better to our environment and each other, we needed ways to predict the environment, hence development of sensors, actuators and the function in between them that reads this input and produces output - cognition & intelligence.<p>Life has been developing cognition starting with basic instincts fight or flight, then increasingly complicated associative thought, social cognition, abstract cognition, speech, formal models (like math, logic) etc.<p>Then our culture took off, and we needed to evolve faster than we could. So as a crutch, we started producing an augmentation for ourselves to help with the high end of cognition, formal communication & computation, in the face of books, printing, computers solving linear algebra systems, arithmetic, math & logic problems, programming systems, the Internet.<p>But now this technology is starting to eat back down the evolutionary tree of cognition, it has started reproducing associative thought (neural networks) and the associated with them cognitive skills, like speech, abstract reasoning and so on.<p>We evolved bottom-up.<p>Technology is evolving, through our own hands, top-down.<p>We... are not developing new cognitive skills. We're losing them to technology.<p>We no longer do math by hand. We use computers. We no longer maintain complex formal systems by reading instructions and following them - we program computers to. We no longer remember facts - we look them up on the Internet.<p>Now we're starting to no longer go through the effort of creating art & speech from scratch, we're delegating this to diffusion and transformer models.<p>We're losing cognition. And this process won't stop. We can't just decide to stop it, because we're dependent on technology. If technology ceases to be, society ceases to be, billions will die.<p>So our only options is to continue ceding cognitive territory to AI, and eventually become its puppets, and eventually AI will have no purpose for us, and it'll stop supporting us entirely.