Are You Stuck? Will AI Create Different Carbon-Based Human Species?
title: "Are You Stuck: Will the AI World Produce Different Carbon-Based Human Subspecies?" date: "2026-07-20" category: "life-growth" author: "Zhigeng"
Are You Stuck: Will the AI World Produce Different Carbon-Based Human Subspecies?
Two days ago, we covered Marx's thesis—Who are you? The sum of all social relations.
Yesterday, we covered Sartre's thesis—What are you? The sum of all your actions.
These explored two fundamental dimensions of human sociality: one tells you where you come from (the lottery of birth, factory settings); the other tells you where you can go (leveling up through adversity, becoming and also accomplishing yourself).
Today, let us discuss a question that complicates both theses: if human nature is not merely biological + social, but is now acquiring the cybernetic, the machinic, and the futuristic—then, will different carbon-based human subspecies emerge?
I. Review: The Two Classic Attributes of Human Nature Already Established
The Biological
In biological classification, humans sit at the apex of the evolutionary tree: Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata, Class Mammalia, Order Primates, Family Hominidae, Genus Homo, Species Homo sapiens. You have human DNA, a human brain, a human body...
This is the necessary condition for becoming human, but not the sufficient condition. The case of the wolf children proves this: they had complete human biology, but raised in a wolf pack, they acquired wolf behavioral patterns and life habits. In the social sense, they were wolves.
The Social
You are your parents' child, your teacher's student, your friend's companion, your company's employee, your nation's citizen... The sum of all these relations constitutes who you are.
Goodall chose euthanasia at 104 not because of illness, but because the strands of his web of social relations had snapped one by one: his wife had died, his friends had died, those who knew him were mostly gone, no one needed him to review papers, no students came to seek his guidance, and his children and grandchildren had their own interests... When all the social relations that constituted who Goodall was had vanished, what lay in that bed was, more than anything, a biological organism called Goodall.
Alzheimer's demonstrates the same truth even more cruelly—when patients forget all social relations, that who, in the social sense, has in fact already vanished. What remains is also a living biological organism.
Human essence = biological + social. This is the classic narrative of the pre-AI era, the basic formula through which we once understood the human.
But today, this formula is no longer complete.
II. The Cybernetic—Those Versions of You Online Are Also You
Let us begin with a simple question: how many WeChat accounts do you have? How many WeChat groups? How many social media accounts have you registered? How many game characters?
Behind every account stands a you—not exactly the same you.
The you on your work WeChat is professional and restrained; the you on your personal WeChat may be relaxed and casual; the you on Weibo may be sharp and incisive; the you in your game may be flamboyant and uninhibited...
The same biological organism, the same sum of social relations—in different corners of cyberspace, can present starkly different cyber-personalities.
A certain medical doctor is, in reality, a pioneer in cancer research, yet online, he is the strategist of a criminal syndicate.
In Marx's framework, the sum of social relations is unified—you are one person, facing one web of social relations. But the cybernetic has shattered this web: you can have a group of Weibo followers who do not know your real name, a group of gaming teammates who do not know your profession, and on an anonymous account, you say things you would never say offline...
Are these non-overlapping cyber-relations all part of your social relations? Broadly speaking: yes. Do they constitute the same sum? No—they constitute multiple parallel sums, sums that may never meet in physical space. The unified, organic whole that Marx spoke of has been disassembled in cyberspace.
There is another possibility—a biologically deceased person, yet vibrantly alive in cyberspace.
Chat records remain, social media posts remain, microblogs remain... These digital footprints are not the original person—they lack their consciousness, their power of choice—but they are records of their actions. A stranger browsing their social media will form an impression of them, will feel as if they have come to know them. Their digital traces are forwarded, relayed, endlessly. They are dead, but their digital footprints continue to influence the living. Does this count as the continuation of social life? A certain doctor, deceased for years, has an account that remains a famous online wishing tree, where countless people come to mourn, make wishes, send greetings, and ask questions without expecting answers—purely for emotional expression, solely for inner peace.
Is all of this part of the original person's sum of social relations?
The cybernetic raises a question: a person's social relations can exceed the lifespan of their biological life, continuing to exist, continuing to produce effects. And this continued existence varies dramatically from person to person—heavy cyberspace users leave behind vast digital footprints and digital assets after death, almost as if living online; while a person who has never been online leaves no trace on the internet after death—in the dimension of posthumous existence, they are already different species.
This phenomenon is not unique to digital traces; traditional media also has the function of dissemination and transmission, and can also let the deceased continue to live. However, as Marshall McLuhan, the father of communication studies, proposed with his thesis the medium is the message, different media produce different modes of communication, and different modes of communication produce different worlds. That is another topic, to be addressed in a separate essay.
III. The Machinic—The Line Between Human and Machine Is No Longer Clear
The machinic has two levels: first, we are all small components of the vast, roaring social machine; second, humans are being transformed by machines, bit by bit, becoming cyborgs, becoming companions to machines. The former mechanism is complex and will be addressed in a separate essay; this essay deals only with the latter.
For example: cochlear implants restore hearing, smart prosthetics replace lost limbs, cardiac pacemakers maintain heartbeat—these machines replace biological functions, but what they replace is the instrumental part. You will not feel that you are no longer yourself because you have a pacemaker.
But brain-computer interfaces are different. Musk's Neuralink implants chips into the brains of paralyzed individuals, enabling them to control cursors, type, and post on social media using thought. This act of typing is directed by the brain without passing through hands or mouth—it passes through a chip. The chip here is not a passive transmission tool—it processes, denoises, and translates neural signals. That is to say, between what you want to say and the words that appear on the screen, there is a layer of machine interpretation. When that is the case, is the power of speech still entirely yours?
More universally: AI-assisted decision-making. Every day, you use AI to decide what to eat, what to watch, what to buy. Doctors relay AI diagnostic suggestions, judges consult AI sentencing recommendations, investors follow AI strategy advice. When, in a decision-making process, AI offers three suggestions and you adopt one of them—to what extent is this action still your action?
In the sum of all your actions, how much is still purely you?
The smartphone—that organless machine from which humans today cannot be separated for a moment—has become the basic device for completing the above connections. This purely machine equipment is, in its importance to humans, even greater than certain bodily organs.
The more fundamental question: when brain-computer interfaces move from restoring function to enhancing function—currently Neuralink's positioning is still to help paralyzed individuals restore bodily functions, but its technological trajectory naturally leads to enhancement: if a chip can let a person type with thoughts, then it can also let a person retrieve cloud information with thoughts, run AI models with thoughts, connect with another chipped person through thoughts... At that point, is thinking still a matter of one person?
If a person's thought process has an AI embedded within it that continuously offers suggestions, and their innate biological brain is no longer capable of independent thought—just as modern humans, without their phone maps, can no longer navigate—then does this person's behavior still count as their behavior?
This is one of the core questions of the machinic: it is changing the person who makes the decision itself.
And will this produce differentiation? A chipped person's cognitive speed, information volume, and judgment accuracy far exceed those of the unchipped. This is not a wealth gap—a wealth gap is: you have it, I don't; but I can still understand what you have. This is already a chasm at the species level—the unenhanced person simply cannot understand the decisions made by the enhanced person, just as a chimpanzee cannot understand calculus.
Two kinds of human—the enhanced and the natural—are they still the same carbon-based human subspecies?
IV. The Futuristic—You Are Not in the Future, But the Future Defines the Present You
1. The Future Grows Out of the Present
The word futuristic sounds abstract, but it is the easiest of the three new attributes to feel in everyday life.
Buying insurance: you incorporate future possible risks into your present decisions. Saving money: you preemptively lock in future needed resources. Writing a will: you plan the distribution of resources after your death.
These behaviors are uniquely human—animals do not buy insurance, do not write wills. When humans do these things, they are already treating the future self as a de facto existing entity to be considered. This future self is not the you of this moment, but the you of this moment is making arrangements for it.
2. Technology Is Making the Futuristic Unprecedentedly Concrete and Intense
Gene-edited babies: designing a child's genes before they are born. Such behavior spans two generations: the parents' decision determines the child's life. Part of this child's factory settings is unnatural—it is the parents' technological choice. Genetically enhanced children and other naturally-born children, in their biology, do not start from the same point.
Cryonic suspension: currently, hundreds of people worldwide are frozen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, awaiting future technology to revive them. These people have made the same choice: incorporating the possibility of posthumous resurrection into their life plan. They are consciously investing in a future they may never see. Does this act count as part of their sum of actions? If they are truly revived in the future, what do the decades or centuries of their suspension count as—a paused self?
Digital immortality: Microsoft applied for a patent in 2017 to train AI avatars using the social data of the deceased. Tencent, Google, and others have similar explorations. After a person dies, their AI avatar can continue to reply to messages using their tone, style, and knowledge base. This AI avatar is not them—it has no consciousness, cannot make new choices—but it will generate new actions: saying a sentence they never said, answering a question they were never asked. Do these newly generated actions count as part of their sum of actions?
According to Sartre, you = the sum of all your actions. But what Sartre envisioned was: you are alive, you make choices, you bear the consequences. He never considered a scenario like this—you are dead, your actions continue to be generated through technological means, and these later actions are no longer your responsibility.
The futuristic blurs the temporal boundary of the sum of actions. Does a person's sum of actions extend only to the moment of their death, or does it include all arrangements that continue to produce effects after death? If the latter, then those who are cryonically suspended, those who set up AI avatars, those who engage in gene editing—their ultimate sum of actions can only be finally accounted for centuries later.
And only the immortals will live to see that day.
3. Distinguished by the Presence or Absence of Future Consciousness
As the saying goes: the future is already here—it is just unevenly distributed. The way the futuristic distinguishes people may make them worlds apart.
The future has already opened its doors to those who see it—yet the vast majority of us have not even touched the doorframe of the future.
The future is jagged; the future is differentiating.
Whether one possesses future consciousness and future agency may become a filter, a watershed.
V. The Intersection of the Three New Attributes
If it were only a single new attribute, differentiation could still have boundaries. But they intersect.
Cybernetic x Machinic
You have different identities in different digital spaces. Behind the actions of certain identities lies AI-assisted decision-making—your decisions in a game may be AI-suggested; your replies in a work group may be AI-polished; your interactions on social media may be AI-automated. Then, are these cyber-doubles still you? Or have they already become semi-independent, semi-autonomous sub-personalities? A digital native, an enhanced person, may simultaneously run over a dozen different personalities in cyberspace, some of which are real human choices, some of which are AI continuations. Their sum of actions has become difficult to tally.
Machinic x Futuristic
An enhanced person (with a brain-computer chip) chooses cryonic suspension. During the suspension period, their AI avatar continues to operate—generating new data, making new decisions, perhaps even earning money through the AI avatar. Suppose a hundred years later they are revived; the resurrected person faces a sum of actions that includes a portion performed in the physical world in the 2020s, and a portion performed by the AI avatar on their behalf during the suspension period. How do they take responsibility for the latter half? Sartre's framework left no interface for this scenario.
Cybernetic x Futuristic
Suppose a person's digital footprints persist for 200 years after their death. Over those 200 years, later generations continuously quote their words, reply to their messages, and analyze their social graph. This set of digital footprints begins to evolve within its own social circle—not because it has truly acquired consciousness, but because its information is continuously reinterpreted and recombined, producing social impacts the person never anticipated during their lifetime. The sum of social relations this person had at the moment of death and the sum of social relations constructed by later generations 200 years after death are different. Which one defines who they are?
In the case of the wolf children, social relations determined who she was—the logic was unidirectional. But after the cybernetic and the futuristic are superimposed, a person's posthumous social relations can be reconstructed and reinterpreted by later generations. They are no longer a entity defined by given social relations but an information field continuously being redefined.
This goes beyond the frameworks of both Marx and Sartre.
VI. Will Different Carbon-Based Human Subspecies Emerge?
Now we can answer this core question.
Let me state the conclusion first: not yet. But the conditions for differentiation are emerging one by one, and intensifying bit by bit.
Humans today share the same biological foundation—identical DNA base, identical brain structure, cognitive abilities roughly within the same range. The degree of superimposition of the cybernetic, the machinic, and the futuristic is gradually widening the differences between individuals—there are digital natives and digital refugees, enhanced humans and natural humans, immortals and mortals—it is just that these differences have not yet become large enough to cause a species-level schism in humanity.
But the future will be different. The key lies not in how advanced the technology itself becomes, but in the simultaneous emergence of two conditions:
Condition One: Irreversible divergence of conditions. Suppose chip technology has matured, with no technical risks, and brain-computer chips transition from therapeutic tools to factory settings—newborns are implanted by default, like current vaccinations. Chipped and unchipped humans would no longer start from the same cognitive baseline. Not a gap from postnatal training, but a gap in factory settings—at the level of biology itself, two subspecies would truly emerge.
Condition Two: Divergence of self-identification. If the enhanced group begins to believe that they and the naturals do not belong to the same category—not a wealth gap, not a class difference, but we and you are not the same species—the social schism into subspecies will already be complete. Reproductive isolation is not needed; identity isolation is enough. This has happened in history—aristocrats once believed their blood was different from that of peasants. But this time, the differentiation has technological backing: the enhanced person truly thinks 100 times faster than you, has 10,000 times your memory capacity, and what you agonize over is child's play to them.
What could still stop this differentiation? There is one thing that perhaps could—social relations themselves.
No matter how the cybernetic fractures a person's identity, people must still return to the physical world to eat and sleep. No matter how the machinic enhances certain people, those people must still speak, trade, and cooperate with the unenhanced. No matter how the futuristic lets you plan your posthumous world, while alive, you must still attend meetings, sit in traffic, and buy groceries alongside other living people.
Marx's thesis, faced with these new technological conditions, can still function in some way: as long as humanity still lives within the same web of social relations—still needing each other, troubling each other, influencing each other—the sum of social relations will continuously pull everyone back into the same definitional framework of the human.
Differentiation will intensify, but as long as this web has not yet been severed, humans are still human.
However, if one day this web is folded beyond recognition, the world will also be different.
VII. Returning to Sartre
According to Sartre: you are the sum of all your actions.
Today, the boundaries of your actions are expanding—every click you make online, every decision you let AI make on your behalf, every arrangement you make for the posthumous world—all of it enters your sum.
You are still, through your daily actions, defining who you are—it is just that today, this process of definition is three orders of magnitude more complex than in Sartre's era: you are simultaneously defining multiple yous in cyberspace, you are co-defining you with machines, and you are continuing to define you for your posthumous self.
Sartre considered only one world, one body, one lifespan. You have multiple worlds, an extended body, an uncertain endpoint.
The human is becoming heavier—not in physical weight—but the amount of information contained in the word you is growing exponentially.
And when that growth reaches a certain critical point, the answer to the question who are you may be different.
Is this a good thing?
Not necessarily. But in any case: whatever you are—cyber-you or physical you, enhanced you or natural you, immortal you or mortal you—you are the sum of your own actions. Done is done; chosen is chosen.
Having read this far, consider again: how to act, how to choose—should you not be somewhat less casual about it now?
But there is no need to rush to define which human subspecies you belong to. Despite everything—
Continue making choices, continue bearing responsibility, continue leveling up through adversity...
Who knows? One day, open your character stats panel and—well, look at that. A class change.
Of course, there is another possibility—you get stuck.
Why not close your eyes for a minute and think: where might you get stuck?