What Will Become of the Animal That Built the World?: How Human Instinct Still Rules Civilization in the Age of AI.

This is not another book about artificial intelligence. This is a book about the animal that created artificial intelligence. We are erratic: knowledge has evolved. We still lack complete wisdom.

Homo sapiens has built increasingly sophisticated systems: money, states, markets, science, the internet, and, without a doubt, more will come. Yet we are still driven by the same fundamental impulses: security, belonging, meaning, power, ambition, fear, affection…

perhaps even the search for permanence. Systems have become autonomous and, to varying degrees, have begun to dominate human beings themselves across large regions.

Today, money dominates much of politics; technology has increasingly powerful tools for controlling attention; the media influences perception; algorithms control certain emotions (TikTok); war takes up a substantial part of the budget; and consumption becomes intertwined with personal identity.

There is an ambivalence in our lives. There has never been so much technology, yet it can generate enormous collective anxiety; never so much wealth, yet also so much concentration of wealth; never so much information, yet so much misinformation.

Homo sapiens is, without a doubt, an extraordinary creature, capable of composing symphonies and building bombs. And what will become of all this in the future? We will try to imagine what our lives might look like through 2050, perhaps a little beyond. Not everything will be different.

Consciousness will drive progress, but in some human groups, darkness will prevail. Throughout this e-book, and especially in the appendix, we also try to explain how a promise called Brazil works, and how some of its very peculiar sapiens operate.