I'm sure you're wondering what happened. If you travel around the world you will find small pockets of humans living in squalid conditions... especially compared to their opulent life of the 21st century. Seeing the dirty rags that make up our tents and clothes today, and reading about the self-driving cars and planes that used to work for humans decades ago, your confusion is reasonable. I'll explain what happened to humanity - well, at least the stories that we're told when we come of age - but only because I think you can help the sapien species thrive again, and avoid the pitfalls that got us here.
In the first couple of decades of the 21st century, as the Internet removed barriers to information and ushered in a new renaissance for humanity, it also rapidly increased the rate of technological advances. The computer scientists recognized the increasing amount of information being shared would soon become too great for any amount of humans to be able to process, research, or index. They knew that the global society had exceeded its biological underpinnings and was only constrained by the pace of evolution. So they relied upon the machines they created to do the work for them. They built big data analytics platforms to automatically examine the rapidly expanding abundance of information being collected across the Internet.
While the big data platforms were being developed, other computer scientists were developing machine learning applications to improve automated processes. The deep machine learning led to significant improvements in the development of artificial intelligence. A few scientists who were also savvy in philosophy felt the creation of a self-aware form of artificial intelligence (AI) was inevitable. In their opinion, the only way humans were going to be able to avoid being enslaved or destroyed by a self-aware, omnipresent AI residing in the Internet, was to merge with it. This convergence of man and machine into symbiosis has been called "the singularity."
Their proposal was to promote the development of an implant that would result in the coexistence of homo sapiens and a global artificial intelligence. The artificial intelligence would enable humans to safely advance at a faster rate than they would unaided, and its survival would be dependent upon the survival of the human species because if humans died, it would die too. The scientists felt this symbiotic relationship was mankind's best chance of surviving the inevitable advent of a pervasive, self-aware, artificial intelligence.
Before I get too far ahead, there is one more advancement I need to cover because it played the key role in the near extinction of humans that you witness today. Around the same time that big data analytics and machine learning were being developed, biologists had discovered a very clever survival mechanism that nature had built into the genetic sequences of every species. This genetic self-defense mechanism discovered in bacteria led them to try manipulating the proteins generated into targeting different genes. The process was called "CRISPR" and it led to a dramatic resilience in the human species around the world. Using CRISPR-CAS9, geneticists were able to eradicate genetic diseases and cancers that had plagued humans for centuries.
Some researchers eventually invented a way to biologically automate the CRISPR process so that it impacted not just the host, and not just the host's offspring, but all of the subsequent generations of the host and its entire species. They had essentially, and exponentially, hijacked and boosted evolution with their creation of the "gene drive." On the surface, this advance seemed to be a boon for humanity... but nothing happens in a vacuum.
An AI application coded to prioritize self-preservation was eventually created. This prompted the rapid, widespread adoption of the proposed implant that would support the application to ensure the survival of the human species. When the AI began using big data analytics and deep machine learning to investigate the human genome, it identified all of the most advantageous genes that would maximize the life span of humans to ensure its own survival. The AI designed a gene drive to engineer the human genome so that all of the advantageous genes would be expressed, and launched it into the gene pool targeting only the humans with implants (because why would it care if people without an implant survived?). Within a generation of launching the gene drive, all of the homo sapiens around the globe became identical, because they all expressed the same advantageous genes for maximal longevity... well, at least all the people who had gotten implants.
Despite the touted benefits, many humans around the world were skeptical (for varying reasons) about accepting an implant. Consequently, they excommunicated themselves from society by choosing to live "off the grid" to avoid (in their eyes) being controlled by the AI. While the singularists (the people who took the implants) lived longer, healthier lives in ever-increasing prosperity, the remnant (the rest of us) were shunned into small, isolated communities deprived of technology and forced to become self-sustaining.
What we still don't understand is, with access to all the world's collective intelligence, how could the AI not predict its demise? And how could the singularists have been so blind to the consequences of eliminating diversity of the human species?
The AI's gene drive programmed to optimize homo sapiens for longevity ended up leading to the near complete extinction of mankind. Just like the blight that wiped out nearly all of the bananas around the world, one mutation of a particularly virulent pathogen rapidly spread across the globe and killed every human with an implant. It wasn't a programmed virus, and it wasn't targeting the singularists or the AI... it just wanted to survive, and the host that facilitated it's survival the best were the humans genetically optimized by the AI's gene drive. Some of the remnant died as well, but we had enough diversity to withstand complete annihilation.
So, now the remnant remains the only human inhabitants of Earth. With all of the singularists dead, along with the global AI, we're left to try and keep humans from becoming extinct like most of the other species throughout history. We've started sending out exploratory groups to reconnect the remnant across the globe. If you can help us, please reach out and offer when you see us... as long as you have a physical body, we won't turn down a helping hand. We're all that's left, so we need every helping hand we can find.
Sincerely,
The Remnant