The intestinal tract is one of the body’s most energy-intensive parts. As its energy-usage fell, large amounts of energy were released to support growth elsewhere in the body. And where in the body did this unleashed energy go? It headed north to what would in time become human’s most energy-intensive organ of all – the brain. This energy surge caused the brain to grow and its neural connections to multiply. The result was an organ which, despite being only 2-3% of our body mass, today accounts for 25% of its energy consumption. This may have been one of the key evolutionary steps in human history. It is the brain, above all other organs, that distinguishes humans from other animals. Our closest biological cousin, the primates, have physiologies which are 99%-identical to ours. Where they differ most significantly is the brain. In primates, the brain uses only 8% of the body’s energies – a third of humans. It is our energy-intensive brains that put humans of an entirely different evolutionary trajectory to all other animals. To see why, note that the pace of evolutionary progress in all animals, other than humans, is determined by biology. It occurs through a sequence of slow-moving, biological mutations. This can take millions of years to bring about recognisable change. That is why almost-all animals live in an almost-identical environment for an almost-identical lifespan doing near-identical tasks to their ancient ancestors. Human biologies are no different. The appendix is a biological artefact.
I cannot see a robot replacing GSA lecturers in my lifetime. The BBC app tells me a teacher, childminder or artist has a probability of being automated of less than 10%. Even if you are an economist, it is only 15%.31 If anything, we might see the demand for these skills grow in the period ahead. It has been estimated that, between now and 2030, demand for jobs where creativity is a key skill could increase by 30-40%. Demand for jobs with high levels of social and emotional skills are forecast to increase by 25%.32 For all the jobs lost, new ones will be created in a different image, mirroring the pattern in previous Industrial Revolutions. We may also need to be more creative about how we define “creative”. TV programme-makers are creative, but so are computer program-makers. AI is about as creative an activity as you could imagine. NESTA have tried to classify the creativity of tasks. Their estimates put the number of people currently in creative professions at between a fifth and a quarter.33 Were jobs to evolve in line with expectations, that fraction could rise to more than a third in the next decade. For a great many tasks, it is probably wrong to even think of jobs being displacement. More likely, their nature and the skills required will evolve. Take medicine. Many aspects of clinical diagnosis and prescription are routine.