Artificial intelligence will change computers. Artificial evolution will change us. The latter is immensely more important. Computers are fine as they are, but humans certainly need improvement, and fast. It would be nice to tinker with our own code, alter the happenstance of natural selection. Dear nature, you’ve done very well to have brought us so far, but we’ll take it from here. From now on, we will do the selecting, thank you very much.
With the superior judgment and intellect that are the results of billions of years of natural selection, we will chart the future course of human evolution. No more accidents. There has been much speculation about the new and improved species that we will become, but much of it has been wild and fanciful. Wings, larger brains, superhuman strength, all that. But I propose here a few upgrades that are more practical and useful.
To begin with, the location of the taste buds. I think they should be shifted from the tongue to the fingertips. You should taste food before you put it in your mouth, not after. Now if you can taste by touch, you won’t have to swallow food unwillingly or spit it out if it’s not to your liking. There are other pluses: if you’re watching your weight, you can taste the food without ingesting it (have your cake and not eat it too). Finger food will now be exactly that. And you can touch people to find out what they taste like, without biting them or licking them. Imagine shaking hands with someone and telling if they are sour or bitter or sweet (or if they’ve had sambar rice or biriyani for lunch).
The other thing I would like to do is bring back the tail. Natural selection had a great idea with the tail, an incredibly useful appendage. Then, for some mysterious reason, excised it from the human body. A prehensile tail would be the fifth limb that we so badly need. It could hold our phones while we type with two hands. If thick enough, it would be a third leg, so we could park ourselves comfortably on it instead of sitting, and give our buttocks a break. And we could avoid fights by wagging it when meeting strange bipeds. It could also serve as a signalling device in other ways, such as lifting it to indicate interest in mating, or tucking it between the legs to indicate the opposite.
A third change to the human form I propose has to do with the nose. We should copy the elephant trunk. A long, bendy nose would be handier than you’d think. It could function as a hand, to begin with. Just like an elephant’s trunk. They can pick up food and convey it to the mouth, leaving the hands free to do other things. It could also be equipped with enhanced olfactory functionality (elephants can smell water from up to 19 kilometres away – I found this nugget on the Net, so it might or might not be true). And since they can be used as straws to suction up drinks, they would be eco-friendly.
These are merely illustrative examples (is that a tautology?). The possibilities are limitless, of course. But AE could all too easily veer towards the frivolous or merely cosmetic, such as bigger endowments. So one has a duty to offer the right kind of examples.