The End of the Human Age

Why It Feels Like Things Are Unraveling for Our Civilization — And Where We Go Next

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Image Credit: Cavan

One of the ways I’ve begun to think to think about now, this era, goes like this. It’s simple, straight to the point, and maybe a little chilling. This is the End of the Human Age.

Now, if you keep up with your climate change literature, you know about a concept called “the Anthropocene.” That means that this is the geological era — Paleocene, Eocene, etcetera — where, for the first time, human beings have altered the planet, in drastic ways. That’s not quite what I mean. I mean something…at once bigger, and yet a little closer to home. Let me try to explain.

Think of some of the great, rising forces of now. Extinction — not as in Mad Max, we all die tomorrow, and hundred foot tsunamis race across the globe, but as in, deep history’s Sixth Mass Extinction Event, thanks to rapidly rising temperatures. Then there’s AI. And finally, there’s the ongoing death of democracy, which is happening much, much faster than people really know, think about, columnists write about, our intellectuals fully yet understand.

What do all those add up to? The End of the Human Age.

There are two ways to think about this little concept. The first one — the easy one — goes like this. For an age now, this has been…about…us humans. This sense of “The End of the Human Age” is material, biophysical, geospatial. During the Human Age, we became the planet’s dominant species, by a very long way. We displaced all the rest, strip mined the earth, called the stuff we made out of its resources “goods,” first invaded and conquered one another for them, not to mention the slaves who made them, and then traded them on global markets.

But now? Think about what happens next — biophysically, geospatially, socioeconomically. Now we’re on the retreat. As our cities and states and regions and towns become uninhabitable, of course, we will face difficult choices. Do we build seawalls around them? Abandon them? How long can you really stop…an ocean…a never-ending drought…crop failures… season after season? Animals are already fleeing to the poles — one of the most striking findings of recent science. So, too, will we have to — or at least to habitable regions, as large parts of the world become Fire Belts, Flood Belts, maybe even Plague Belts.

Then there’s the way AI is already reshaping our world. You can already see people beginning to…just…replace…humanity. Before, “technology” meant “things that replaced human or animal muscle” — so cars replaced horses, cotton gins replaced slaves (even if they were operated by more slaves), combustion engines replaced steam engine coal-shovellers, software programs replaced “computers,” which is what the original operators of today’s computers were called — way back when, in the 50s, “computer” was a job. 

That should be a little eerie, because today, it’s pretty obvious that a lot of jobs are about to go exactly that route — and this time, it’s not just muscle that technology’s replacing, it’s humanity, period. The mind, the heart, the soul. The average person couldn’t care less — weaned on a diet of Netflix and Marvel Movies — if there’s a real person writing a book, film, or song, or not. They just want some escape from the dreariness, pain, and relentless empty horror of life at the end of capitalism.