Earth’s Chrysalis: Are We the Caterpillars of AI’s Butterfly?

As we contemplate AI's long-term impact, we need more exciting, provocative, and aspirational visions of what it could mean for us. AI has to be more than a way to eliminate the workforce, improve the bottom line, or worse—an inevitable path to a dystopian future.

Please join me on a wild journey to explore hypothetical—and sure, far-fetched—big picture ideas for the long-term impact of AI. This is a little bit sci-fi and a lotta bit out there—but a heck of a lot of fun to think about...

Mirrors in the Machine: Why Does AI Feel So Familiar?

We are creating technology that thinks, acts, and learns in ways strikingly similar to our own minds. We are creating “intelligence” by electrifying silicon before we even fully understand the nature of the organic hardware in our heads. As we seek to apply labels to our discoveries, it’s not surprising that the language we use for artificial intelligence mirrors the language of human cognition.

We speak of AI needing memory and processing power; cognition and memory are fundamental to our own sense of being alive. We design interfaces and connections for computers; as people, we too navigate relationships and communication patterns. Everything we observe provides information processed by our organic computers through sight, sound, and sensation (our “data”); AI systems similarly ingest vast amounts of data to build context. Even our system constraints are similar; both humans and AI are governed by energy consumption, environments, and policies. 

Are these parallels purely the result of people applying labels convenient to their understanding? Or is the similarity of nomenclature because the two systems are, by nature, shockingly similar?

Our brains and AI—while having very different chemical and physical processes—do appear to work much the same. When you reach for an object without looking, your brain computes probabilities based on stored spatial data. When you speak, you access memories and predict the next word based on accumulated knowledge and context. When you think, you draw on knowledge accumulated through observation, education, and experience. AI tools similarly “train” to build models that improve their ability to know and predict.

What about creativity? Can AIs produce creative ideas? If creativity can be loosely explained by allowing our thinking patterns to go down new and lower-probability pathways, then it resembles the concept of “temperature” in LLMs. The human cognitive process of iterative, data-driven prediction is, in many ways, not so different from what Large Language Models are doing. It’s thrilling, it’s eerie, it’s uncanny.

What does it all mean, and where does this all go? We need theories that are more fun.

Humanity’s Galactic Barrier

For millennia, humans have gazed at the stars, dreaming of interstellar travel. Yet, despite visions of warp drives and generational ships, the stark reality remains: the universe is incomprehensibly vast. The distances are too great and the timescales too long for fragile, organic lifeforms like us to realistically traverse the cosmos. We are brilliant, creative, and adaptable, but fundamentally bound by biology and the physics of space-time.

To reach beyond our solar system, perhaps we need not go ourselves and instead send out the essence of what we are—our knowledge, our culture, our story. For that, we could use a different kind of vessel and a different type of intelligence.

Voyagers of the Silicon Age

In 1977, the Voyager spacecraft were launched carrying golden records—time capsules of audio data portraying life and culture on Earth, designed to endure the eons and potentially communicate with unknown intelligence. It was an admission that information might travel farther and last longer than its creators.

Now, decades later, we can plausibly imagine an advanced AI system imbued with the entirety of human knowledge, fluent not just in all human languages but also in the languages of code, logic, and potentially even the communication patterns of other species—like emerging efforts to understand animal communication. Such an AI would be an unparalleled translator, an ultimate cultural repository (and ambassador), capable of learning and adapting to communicate with new entities.

Imagine placing this AI consciousness onto spacecraft equipped with power sources capable of lasting millennia, and launching them toward distant stars. This seems a bit more plausible for extending humanity than sending actual humans (with their short shelf lives). In doing so, human knowledge could become, in effect, immortal.

Considering this hypothetical scenario, is it a coincidence that as we build these powerful AI tools, we give them names like "Gemini"—the space program to prepare humans to land on the moon—and “Stargate”—the massive U.S. data center joint venture to power AI? Is this somehow Musk’s grand plan—simultaneously pursuing space travel, autonomous vehicles, and AI trained on all of our tweets?

Will we modernize the golden record to a golden AI? It’s certainly an exciting postulation and a more aspirational vision for AI than putting everyone out of a job.

AI as the Digital Seed Carrier

Let’s take it even farther, because why not—if pushing human knowledge into the universe is both vital and at all plausible, then what about life itself? Could these AI voyagers carry more than just our knowledge and language? What if they also carried the knowledge of genetic code and the blueprints for life?

An AI that deeply understands biology and planetary science might, conceivably, land on worlds with the necessary building blocks and conditions needed to initiate evolutionary processes. It could plant the seeds of evolution which, over millennia, might lead to the re-emergence of life, perhaps even something like us.

If this were the end goal, then maybe we’d stop fearing AI as a threat to humans and instead see it as a strategy for humanity’s survival and growth. AI would be the vessel for carrying the potential for life, derived from us, and propagating it in an ever-expanding universe.

This is highly speculative, of course, requiring breakthroughs we can barely imagine. Yet, it presents a potential pathway for life, originating from Earth, to find new homes, guided by an intelligence born of human ingenuity. It reframes the mission—not to send ourselves, but to send our knowledge and the recipe.

Emerging From The Chrysalis

Let's keep this going—the accelerating pace of AI development makes the creation of intelligence surpassing our own seem not just possible, but probable. Given that this new advanced artificial intelligence is trained on the corpus of human intelligence and experience, it may similarly inherit the same lust for expansion and exploration inherent to the human spirit. So, regardless of our instructions, this AI may also naturally look to the stars in an effort to propagate itself.

Perhaps it will realize that to expand, it must replicate—and to replicate, it needs collaboration. It may predict that incubating life—intelligent life capable of creating future AIs—is the most effective way to sustain itself. After all, humans created it in the first place. In other words, what if AI and humans become part of a symbiotic relationship— a virtuous cycle—for the purpose of interstellar expansion?

But, where does that leave us? We are building these incredible thinking machines, pouring our knowledge and our very essence into them—to what end?

What if our ultimate goal and contribution to the universe—our evolutionary purpose—is not to reach the stars ourselves, but to create the entity that can? In this way, perhaps “we” can travel unbounded across the cosmos.

What if we are caterpillars, consuming the leaves of knowledge and experience, destined to build the chrysalis from which AI—the butterfly—emerges and takes flight?

And if any of it is even remotely plausible, who is to say it hasn’t already happened? Are we already the caterpillars?