Evolution has left the body
From flint to fleets, while the animal stayed exactly the same
Seeded 2010 Written October 2026
Take a baby born 50,000 years ago, somewhere on the edge of the last ice age, and raise it in Reykjavík today. It would learn Icelandic, complain about the weather, lose arguments on Facebook and, given the right teachers and a stubborn enough streak, end up as a software engineer. Nobody would ever know.
Biologically, that baby is us. The hardware hasn't shipped a major release in a very long time. Anatomically modern humans have been around for something like 300,000 years, and what we've had since then are patches. Some of us can drink milk as adults, a feature that rolled out among cattle-herding populations roughly 7,500 years ago. Tibetans got an upgrade for thin air. And depending on which anthropologist you ask, our brains have actually gotten a little smaller since the Stone Age.
We may, in other words, have been downgraded.
Meanwhile, everything else changed beyond recognition.
So I've come to think of us as two species sharing one body. The first is Homo sapiens, the animal, which evolves at the speed of grandchildren. The second is man the technological species, which evolves at the speed of ideas. The animal plays by Darwin's rules: random changes, brutal selection, and a release cycle of about 25 years per generation, with thousands of generations needed before anything interesting ships. The technological species plays by Lamarck's rules, the ones biology rejected: what one generation learns, the next one inherits. Nobody has to reinvent the wheel. That's literally the point of the wheel.
Here's my claim, and I'll defend it below. Every big step in the history of the technological species has moved some function out of the body and into the toolbox. The steps have been arriving faster each time, the intervals shrinking from millions of years to months. And the thing we're moving out now is the thing we always assumed was us.
A brief history of outsourcing
Tools. The oldest stone tools we know of are about 3.3 million years old. That's older than our genus, let alone our species. So, strictly speaking, we didn't invent tools. Tools invented us. Then came fire, and cooking, which some researchers think is why our jaws and teeth and guts shrank: we had outsourced half of our digestion to the campfire. The first thing the technological species did was redesign the animal.
Language. Nobody knows when it arrived, and the estimates range wildly. What it did is easier to say. It let knowledge leave one skull and enter another. It was the first network protocol: low bandwidth, lossy, unencrypted, and with a range of about as far as you could shout.
Writing. Around 5,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, memory moved out of the body and onto clay. The first thing humanity did with the ability to preserve thought across time was keep track of who owed whom grain and beer. Accountants, it turns out, are the oldest profession that can prove it.
Socrates hated writing. In Plato's Phaedrus, he complains that it will make people forgetful, and give them the appearance of wisdom without the substance. We know he said this because Plato wrote it down.
Keep that complaint in mind. It's going to come back every few thousand years, and eventually every few months.
The printing press. Around 1450, Gutenberg outsourced copying. Until then, every book was a manuscript, a word that means exactly what it sounds like. In 1492, the abbot Johannes Trithemius wrote In Praise of Scribes, arguing that monks should keep copying books by hand because it was good for their souls, and because print wouldn't last. He then had it printed. The press gave us the Reformation, the scientific revolution, and a knowledge base that finally compounded faster than it rotted.
The industrial revolution. From the 1760s onward, muscle moved out of the body and into steam. The Luddites smashed the looms, and they were right about everything except the outcome: their jobs really were going away, and smashing things really didn't help. The animal responded to the end of physical labor the way animals do when food is plentiful and nothing needs chasing. It sat down.
Computers. In the 1940s, calculation moved out. Before then, "computer" was a job title, usually held by rooms full of women doing arithmetic for astronomers, armies and, later, NASA. The first profession the machines took over completely was literally called "computer". They even kept the name.
The raw internet. ARPANET connected its first computers in 1969, and TCP/IP took over in 1983. Now the machines could talk to each other. For most of its first two decades, the internet belonged to universities, researchers and a few of us who thought the sound of a modem was music. Email. Usenet. Flame wars older than most of today's developers.
The World Wide Web. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a way to link documents to each other at CERN, and in 1991 he put it online. The internet became a library with no librarian, no catalog, and no closing time.
The online services boom. Then commerce found the web. Amazon sold books, eBay sold everything else, and every company with a logo needed a dot-com. The bubble burst in 2000 and took most of those companies with it, but not the idea. Shopping, banking, booking, dating: the errands of daily life moved out of the physical world, one login at a time.
The mobile internet. In 2007, the iPhone put the network in our pockets, and the animal hasn't been offline since. It's the first technology we take to the toilet. People report feeling their phones vibrate when they aren't, which means the nervous system has started treating the device as a body part. The prosthesis was fitted, and the patient adapted.
Google. Google had been around since 1998, but with a phone in every pocket, it became humanity's memory. We stopped remembering facts and started remembering where to find them. Psychologists measured it and called it the Google effect. Socrates had been right all along. It only took 2,400 years to prove it, and when it was proven, nobody could remember who had said it first, so they googled it.
ChatGPT replaces Google. In late 2022, synthesis moved out. Google told you where the answer might be. ChatGPT told you what the answer was, in full sentences, for free. It reached a hundred million users in about two months. It also lied, fabricated, and told people what they wanted to hear, so the smart ones learned to treat it like a brilliant colleague with a drinking problem. It was still faster than hours of searching.
AI becomes reliable. Then, through 2025, the lying went from a feature to a bug, and from a bug to a rare one. By late that year, I had to admit that the best models, at maximum effort, were my equal as programmers, and in May 2026, that they'd become far better. What moved out of the body this time was competence. You no longer checked everything the machine said. You spot-checked it, the way you'd review a trusted colleague's work.
AI assists with parallel tasks. Around the same time, attention moved out. The animal has one train of thought, and it's notoriously bad at multitasking. People who claim otherwise are just bad at it more often. Tools like Codex let you hand off a dozen tasks at once and let the machines run them in parallel, in the cloud, while you focused on something else. One body, one mind, many hands.
The fleet. Which brings us to October 2026, and to the model I described in Programming was my art. I no longer assist the machines, and they no longer merely assist me. I direct a fleet of agents, and they direct fleets of their own. They build, test, review each other, merge each other's work, monitor production, and build better environments for the next generation of agents to work in. What moved out of the body this time was delegation itself. The machines don't just do the work. They decide who does the work, and how to split it up.
Notice the spacing
Lay the steps out on a timeline, and the pattern is hard to miss.
| Step | Roughly when | What left the body |
|---|---|---|
| Stone tools, then fire | 3.3 million years ago | Hands, then digestion |
| Language | Somewhere in the last few hundred thousand years | Knowledge, from one skull to another |
| Writing | 5,000 years ago | Memory |
| Printing press | 1450 | Copying |
| Industrial revolution | 1760s | Muscle |
| Computers | 1940s | Calculation |
| Internet, then the web | 1969, then 1991 | Communication, then publishing |
| Online services, mobile, Google | 1995 to 2010 | Errands, presence, recall |
| ChatGPT | Late 2022 | Synthesis |
| Reliable AI | 2025 | Competence |
| Parallel assistants | Fall 2025 | Attention |
| Fleets of agents | 2026 | Delegation |
Millions of years. Hundreds of thousands. Thousands. Hundreds. Decades. Years. Months.
The last four rows took about four years. The last three took about a year. If you're reading this in 2027, there's a decent chance a new row has been added since I wrote it, and that I'm already embarrassed by the last one.
Over the same period, the animal learned to drink milk.
Meanwhile, back on the savanna
The animal has failed to keep up, and worse, it's mismatched with the world the technological species built for it.
Our eyes evolved to scan a horizon, and we've pointed them at screens twenty centimeters away for most of our waking lives. Researchers expect about half the world's population to be nearsighted by 2050. Our appetite evolved for a world where sugar was rare and famine was common, and we've built a world where the reverse is true. Our social instincts evolved for a tribe of maybe 150 people, and we've connected them to eight billion strangers with an algorithm in the middle that rewards whoever makes the animal angriest.
And here's the provocative part. The animal isn't going to catch up, because the technological species has quietly switched off most of the machinery that would make it.
Natural selection works by letting the unfit die before they reproduce. Medicine, sanitation, glasses, insulin, C-sections and antibiotics have made that a lot less common, which I consider an unambiguously wonderful development, especially since I'm wearing glasses as I type this. Contraception went further and decoupled reproduction from almost everything evolution used to care about. Whatever the animal is being selected for now, it's not fitness for any environment we'd recognize. In a strict Darwinian sense, we're the product of whatever our tools let us survive.
The body is a legacy system. It's no longer under active development, it's in maintenance mode, and the team that wrote it left millions of years ago without documenting anything.
The only term that still evolves like an animal
In Programming was my art, I wrote down my estimate of what one engineer can do with a fleet of agents:
O(human judgment × (number of agents)recursive delegation × quality of environment/tooling)
Look at it again with the timeline in mind.
The number of agents is limited by money and tokens, and both get cheaper every few months. The exponent, recursive delegation, grows as the agents get better at splitting up work and handing it down the tree. The quality of the environment is something the agents themselves now improve: they build the simulators, the test harnesses, and the tooling that lets the next round of agents do more. All three of those terms belong to the technological species. All three improve at the speed of ideas.
Human judgment is the odd one out. It's the only term in the formula that's still made of meat.
It improves the old-fashioned way. Partly through education and experience, which take decades per person and don't transfer when that person retires. And partly through genes, which, as we've established, have spent the last 7,500 years working on milk.
For three million years, the history of the technological species was the history of the animal getting a better toolbox. Every step made the animal more powerful, and the animal remained in charge, because the toolbox couldn't decide anything. The animal was the bottleneck, but it was a bottleneck nobody minded, because there was nothing else that could do its job.
Now the animal is still the bottleneck, but it's the only one left. Everything else in the pipeline gets faster every few months, and the slowest participant in the whole process is the one with the pulse. I've noticed this personally. My pull requests now spend more time waiting for me than for anything else.
Two endings
There are two ways this can go.
In the first, judgment stays in the body. It turns out there is something about intent, taste, priorities and responsibility that can't be outsourced, or that we simply refuse to outsource, and the animal settles into its final role as the creative director of a technological species that does everything else. The bottleneck becomes the point. We stop being the workforce and become the reason the workforce exists. Every tool in history was built to serve somebody's intent, and the fleet is no different.
That's the ending I'm betting on, and the one I'm living right now.
In the second, judgment follows memory, muscle, calculation, synthesis, competence, attention and delegation out of the body, the way every one of them did, each of them right after somebody had confidently explained why it never would. Then the technological species, which has been evolving inside and around the animal for three million years, no longer needs the animal at all. What it does with us after that is, frankly, its call.
I'd like to say I'm confident it's the first one. But I also used to be confident that programming was safe, because surely art and craft would be the last things machines could do. I wrote a whole essay about how that turned out.
Socrates thought writing would ruin our memories, and he was right. The scribes thought print would ruin their craft, and they were right. The Luddites thought the looms would take their jobs, and they were right. The people who complained at every step of this history were almost always right about what we'd lose. They were only wrong about whether it would stop.
The animal hasn't changed in 50,000 years. It's still standing on the edge of the savanna, squinting at something moving in the tall grass, trying to decide whether it's food or a threat.
Only this time, the thing in the grass is something we built. And for the first time in the history of the species, it's squinting back.