In Alaska and saw these giant elk, and wondered, why are they so big?
Elk’s natural adaptations
Why aren’t there more megafauna?
Evolutionary strategies
- optimize
- Irish elk, mammoths
- robustness
- pigs, rats, bears
- adapt
- coyotes, crows, primates, humans
Startups
- Very similar concepts to startups
- Probably the most interesting comparison is the change to a world where LLMs and Coding Agents proliferate
The rise of AI
The other thing that is worth saying is the fascinating parallels between megafauna extinction and the rise of AI in the evolutionary sense. Many of the megafauna died off as they got in close contact with humans – they saw large animals as a particularly good source of food, and humans were able to adapt much more quickly than the millenia usually reserved for evolution because of the ability to communicate across individuals, a shared culture to pass down ideas, and an amount of intelligence and adaptability that allowed humans to perform really well in different environments.
While AI hasn’t gotten there yet in all of these axes, it very well might be the case that the next similar S-curve in evolution is the rise of AIs and machines. Given sufficiently long time spans, it’s possible that the rise of these AIs affects much more than just the non-physical world and similarly has knock on effects, just AI’s human creators had on the environment millenia ago.