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Humans appeared on Earth as a unique biological species with two capacities, which represent specific constituents of human nature: to experience emotions, the driving engines of life, consciously as feelings, either painful or pleasurable; and to manufacture artifacts. Feelings modified evolution of emotions in a runaway manner and made humans hedonotactic beings that aim at nullifying suffering and crave for pleasure. Humans became hyperemotional, hypersocial, and mythophilic animals. Artifaction, hand in hand with hedonotaxis, has launched cumulative cultural evolution, which has been generating ever more complex and pleasing artifacts. Humans have evolved from animal artifaciens into animal artifactus—they themselves becoming artifacts. Runaway of emotional evolution notwithstanding, the human capacity to reason has not undergone a parallel runaway path. There have been the artifacts themselves that set up their runaway evolution, gradually acquiring artificial intelligence and eventually heading toward their independence and their superior rationality that would exceed the constrained rationality of humans. Culture has dramatically enhanced the rate of dissipation of energy gradients. Consequently, human evolution has newly turned into paravolution: random drifts and explosions in multivariable space, processes too fast to permit natural selection, uncontrolled and uncontrollable.  Extrapolation from the speeding up of cultural evolution suggests that humanity will reach the Civilization Singularity in the middle of the twenty-first century, a time point at which  the rate of changes, and hence their unpredictability and uncontrollability by humans, will converge to infinity. The human species has entered the ultimate age of its evolution, in which the exuberance and splendour of feats mediated by artifacts may be metaphorically likened to fireworks.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-20660-8_2

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