{"slug": "how-ai-is-rewriting-human-nature", "title": "How AI Is Rewriting Human Nature", "summary": "Jacob Dreyer, an editor and contributing writer for Noema based in Shanghai, argues that AI-driven advances in longevity science are reshaping human behavior, leading to a paradox where people obsess over extending their lifespans while simultaneously avoiding reproduction. He cites declining birthrates in tech hubs like Silicon Valley and South Korea, linking them to smartphone access and digital solitude, as evidence of a species-level contradiction.", "body_md": "Jacob Dreyer is an editor and contributing writer for Noema based in Shanghai.\n\nLooking in the mirror each morning at my permanently fatigued face, I start my day with a gulp of apple cider vinegar and a vitamin pill. I move on through a box of sardines and a grapefruit, some dense rye bread, some brown yogurt (*ryazhenka*) and cashew nuts. I think of these things as healthful, in the same realm as traditional Chinese medicine — their effects are holistic rather than targeted. Later I lift weights and take creatine, sometimes collagen peptides with green tea; before I go to sleep, ashwagandha and magnesium with silica. My phone routinely tells me that my daily step count was 20,000.\n\nThese health practices are far from niche — many people in my social circle practice them. Like me, the bloodthirsty boys I knew in my late adolescence in Beijing have become anxious men who want to prolong the lives they had once seemed poised to squander, who want to do anything to make sure they’re young or at least imbued with the vitality of the young for as long as possible.\n\nWe know that a new world is being born, one full of incredible technologies, and that it would be absolutely horrible to be old when this world comes into being. So we go to the sauna and moisturize, we eat our slop and do our bloodwork, we yuppies gathering on the edge of a great transformation to human society.\n\nPeople have always wanted to live long and healthy lives, and middle age has a way of elevating concern about longevity. Those who view the future as a voyage through perilous terrain of things like hormonal change and muscle loss, decreasing energy and agility, wrinkled skin and whitening hair seek to prepare. In modern times, in many ways, they have become entrepreneurs of their own bodies: obsessed with nutrition, skincare and weightlifting, hoping to prolong a meat-based existence.\n\nBut the promise of AI for science — from [mapping](https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/) human proteins to [maximizing](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/01/1138133/china-world-first-brain-chip/) the benefits of sleep, diet and exercise — makes increases in longevity a plausible goal. This generation of humans might actually be able to biohack its way into longer lives. Scientists are [ramping up](https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202606/1364357.shtml) their explorations of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) — systems that use AI to turn brain signals into artificial outputs — hoping to eventually upload human consciousness and experience into an eternal digital existence.\n\nStrangely, however, at the same moment when technologically driven increases to human lifespans seem to be on the horizon, our species has taken on a kind of suicide mentality: Far fewer people are having children. Research [suggests](https://www.nber.org/papers/w35310) this may be linked to the rise of computation and technology. A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research [found](https://www.nber.org/papers/w35310) that early smartphone access in the U.S. contributed to lower birthrates.\n\nAround the world, birthrates in many tech hubs are in decline. In Silicon Valley, the birthrate of [9.7 births per 1,000 people](https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/data/people/talent-flows-diversity/births/birth-rate/) is [significantly lower](https://jointventure.org/news-and-media/news-releases/1657-institute-report-silicon-valley-birthrate-lowest-in-30-years-women-having-fewer-children-and-waiting-longer) than elsewhere in the U.S., and has dropped sharply in recent years. In other high-tech places like [South Korea](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12427026/), which has the world’s lowest birthrate at around [five per 1,000 people](https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/south-koreas-birthrate-worlds-lowest-rises-again-amid-signs-easing-demographic-2026-02-25/), many individuals live in digital solitude, and marriage and child-rearing are often [an afterthought or rejected altogether](https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/family-relationships/article/3302346/most-young-people-korea-view-marriage-and-childbirth-mix-sadness-fear-disgust). In China, the birthrate has dropped to [5.63 per 1,000 people](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79r7v7qr53o), a record low. In addition to sharing high housing prices and cultures that center work as a source of meaning and status, these places are all at the frontier of AI.\n\nWhy, at a moment when emergent AI appears poised to open pathways toward personal and collective immortality, did the developed world — and specifically, the typically secular, highly urbanized places that are furthest ahead in advanced technologies — lose its imperative to reproduce?\n\nShanghai, San Francisco, New York, Seoul, Singapore — what these cities have in common is an extremely low birthrate. And, as a consequence, a certain political tremor. Systems based on elevating the median man, like the American democratic order, are in big trouble. Hierarchical systems, like China’s, appear externally more stable, but the population at the bottom of the pyramid seems uninterested in staying there, and isn’t procreating at a sustainable rate.\n\nOn a personal level, there are many rational reasons not to have children: unaffordable housing and childcare prices, the sense that an interesting life can be accessible via travel and work in ways that it wasn’t before and greater autonomy for women. Viewed in aggregate, however, the species seems to have decided to stop reproducing as productively as it could — especially inside tech hubs. In 2025, the global fertility rate, calculating the number of births per woman of childbearing age, reached what the U.N. called an “[unprecedented decline](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clynq459wxgo).” Might it be that the arrival of a radical break in the historical continuum — the emergence of artificial intelligence — will accelerate the collapse of procreation’s value to those closest to it?\n\nThis trend began decades ago, long before the rise of AI, of course. But AI and computation, and the slow shift from the world of the industrial revolution into the world of the information revolution, has been a long time coming in societies like the United States. In China and India, where AI has arrived more rapidly, the birthrates have declined more rapidly, too. Is there something about AI or modern technology in general that makes people less willing to have children?\n\nEven many of those who do have children are [limiting](https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/peter-thiel-bill-gates-steve-jobs-steve-chen-tech-billionaires-publicly-shielding-their-children-from-tech-products-social-media/) their offspring’s access to technologies, from social media to AI to computers in general. There is an increasing sense that human life will be divided into before and after we all began using digital technologies constantly. Many want their children to grow in an artificial condition of beforeness.\n\nI’ve come to believe that the first place where AI will matter in a cosmic, existential sense is in our own bodies. Biology may be the first domain where AI genuinely understands the world rather than merely predicting it.\n\n**Don’t Die**\n\nOne day in 2018, I awoke in Shanghai’s Huashan Hospital with a hole in my head. On the heels of my 20s at the time, I had gotten into a drunken bicycle accident. My head had been gashed open on the pavement of Fuxing Road. The surgeons at Huashan stitched me back together and, as far as I know, saved me from any long-term consequences aside from a scar that my hair covers. Though I have never really been religious, I interpreted this as a sign from God, even though it was equally — or more so — a sign of the quality of the Chinese medical system. The thoughts I have had about China in the intervening years are complex, but whatever their flavor, they emerged from neurons firing within an organ repaired by the Chinese government’s finest surgeons, gurgling in the broth of blood pumping around canals and neural pathways.\n\nMany of the Chinese scientists I brush shoulders with today have returned from American academia to help China’s massive, state-led biotech push. From the labs in Wuxi to the experimental startups in Pudong’s Zhangjiang Science City, there is a sense that biopower is state power. But China’s biotech boom is not driven by Silicon Valley’s libertarian fantasies or metaphysical anxieties. It comes from a socialist-industrial legacy that sees the population as part of a mathematical equation it needs to maximize. There is comfort with large-scale human experimentation, both on the part of the state and that of the people. As the population rapidly ages — more than a quarter is expected to be [over the age of 60](https://www.who.int/china/health-topics/ageing) by 2040 — China is approaching the human body as it once approached steel, cement and architectural blueprints: as an ingredient in the next stage of development.\n\nAs 2025 came to a close, a number of prominent Californians obsessed with their bodies turned up in Shanghai. I met a plastic surgeon from Malibu who had come in search of stem cells, discussing with excitement the idea of grinding up his own bones to extract their marrow. Bryan Johnson, the boy-king of immortality supplements, [arrived](https://x.com/bryan_johnson/status/1991986599241089210) to open a longevity clinic and to hold his [“Don’t Die” summit](https://sd-dds.webflow.io/), an event exploring “the frontiers of longevity, health, and the future of humanity.”\n\nOn Instagram, I got in touch with Chinese peptide manufacturers who [sold](https://www.afr.com/world/asia/tons-of-money-how-china-supplies-untested-peptides-to-the-west-20260218-p5o3gz) their experimental research chemicals to Bay Area tech bros who are busy devouring them in search of physical improvements large and small. But the peptide dealers wouldn’t sell them to me in Shanghai. They told me that the Chinese government hadn’t approved the drugs and that they might not be safe to use.\n\nIn a general sense, it is striking that the Chinese general population and its elite intellectuals are more optimistic about AI and biotech than their American counterparts. My suspicion is Americans feel that their government doesn’t have their interests or safety at heart, that it is actually in league with Big Tech. The Chinese can plausibly see their own government as a force willing to take down tech titans, if need be. There seems to be [little doubt](https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/china-puts-brakes-push-self-083315147.html) that if self-driving cars malfunction, they will be taken off the road. For better or worse, the Chinese Communist Party is in control, and it seems to have a vested interest in social stability.\n\nBack in Huashan Hospital in January for the first time since my injury, I met Ying Mao, who [directs](https://smart.org.cn/en/SMART-Investigator/yingmao) some of China’s most advanced [experiments](https://researchgate.net/profile/Ying-Mao-4) in BCIs. He described patients who’d suffered strokes or spinal cord injuries or had diseases like Parkinson’s who could, with wires attached directly to their brains, [play](https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202512/11/WS693a2979a310d6866eb2e135.html) video games or better respond to questions. It was easy to imagine how a BCI could engender a new sort of AI-enabled living — a freedom, perhaps, from the constraints of our bodies.\n\nChina’s dismal birthrate hangs over it all. What do they want with life forever, I wondered about the Chinese government [natalists](https://www.cfr.org/articles/beijings-pro-natalist-push-continues-strengthen), when their own lives seem so unpleasant? Feminists in China [talk of a birth strike](https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/chinas-birth-crisis-crisis-of-faith-future), an implicit way that people can protest the centralization of power. Korea has the [4B movement](https://theconversation.com/a-woman-is-not-a-baby-making-machine-a-brief-history-of-south-koreas-4b-movement-and-why-its-making-waves-in-america-243355): no marriage, no dating, no childbirth, no sex. Patriarchal men, from those in Korea to Americans like Vice President JD Vance, exhort women to bear children, but have made the world less desirable to live in for many: Patriarchal societies of intense economic competition can be a turn-off and present practical problems for those who do want to have families.\n\nIn China, I’ve heard casual comments to the effect that it would be fine for the country to revert to a few hundred million or so people — down from the country’s more than 1.4 billion today — if they were the “right” people. A nation of intelligent, rich Chinese with no acne, no mental illnesses, no peasants or poor. In China, transhumanism is a post-socialist industrial theology: the dream of a [perfected collective body](http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2021/1231/c40531-32321335.html).\n\nAt the same time, Chinese “embodied AI” systems, models built within humanoid robots or automobiles, are being developed shockingly quickly. Many of the AI models that live inside these humanoid shells have been trained on the human body itself. Already, I have had detailed discussions with acquaintances about their plans to merge with machines and live forever, to isolate their thoughts from their flesh.\n\nThe visions on either side of the Pacific are different. If American transhumanism seeks to escape the body and considers the brain a sort of house for the soul, Chinese transhumanism assumes the body will never leave us and therefore must be redesigned or fixed.\n\n**Frontier Tower**\n\nNot everyone has decided to stop having children. It seems the people with the most knowledge and money often [choose to have many more children](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/opinion/children-parents-billionaires-wealth-fathers.html) than is traditional; in the case of people like Elon Musk, more than a dozen. As the collective we call America mutates in strange ways, [some Americans](https://www.instagram.com/bryanjohnson_/?hl=en) see their own bodies as the site of a new type of science, a site of sovereignty, where individuals can keep the AI systems company in whatever future comes. As Johnson, famous for his ambition not to die, [has put it](https://time.com/collections/future-of-living/7341335/bryan-johnson-longevity/): “As we give birth to AI, it’s possible that this is an emergency situation, that if we don’t take it seriously enough, we may fumble — and it’s not clear whether we humans have a future or not.”\n\nAs such fears [spread](https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/51st-edition-fall-2025), Musk, Johnson and their ilk are working to create a future that they and their heirs will reign over. In the rich world, personal health and reproduction are becoming an elite technology. Many of the tech elite [expect](https://fortune.com/well/2025/06/20/sam-altman-openai-ceo-parenting-kids-ai/) that their children will be living in symbiosis with machine intelligences — that indeed, they already are.\n\nIn mid-January, I visited San Francisco’s [Frontier Tower](https://lifespan.io/news/the-tale-of-one-tower-sf-based-vertical-longevity-village/), a home for tech startups, including those in the biotech space. It had recently hosted a Chinese peptide rave; across the bohemians of the AI bubble, a craze for untested Chinese research chemicals, similar to the ones that became Ozempic, has been spreading. I also visited [AGI House](https://www.agihouse.org/), an AI community and lab up a winding road in the hills, whose residents assured me that such peptides could enhance cognition, sleep and memory. I marveled that in the age of fentanyl, packages of Chinese chemicals that had not been approved by the FDA could be shipped to the U.S.\n\nTranshumanism is no longer a philosophy, no longer a San Francisco subculture or vague futurism. It is infrastructure. It is wealth. Still, [there is a sense](https://www.duperrin.com/english/2025/07/22/2035-ai-no-more-jobs/) that in the future, not that many humans will be necessary. Rather than farmers having a flock of kids to put to work as a form of embodied capital, many city-dwellers have stopped procreating, perhaps sensing in some cases that, for them, the return on investment of a brood would be poor, or that the future is simply too uncertain to start a family.\n\nAs I walked from Nob Hill to a dinner in the Tenderloin with a group of writers covering AI and [Chinamaxxxing](https://www.npr.org/2026/03/13/nx-s1-5743795/chinamaxxing-gen-z-word-of-week) — integrating practices seen as Chinese into their lives, driven by a fascination with China’s high-tech society — I could viscerally sense a society burning the candle at both ends. I wasn’t bothered by the guy I saw smoking meth on the street or the homeless people pushing around shopping carts, but the giddy, euphoric discourse of AI in a fairly run-down place had the vibe of a civilization trying to outrun decay. To be sure, I am part of that civilization, and I am running along with the rest.\n\nAmerica built its civilization around the idea of the individual and a temporary configuration sustained by cheap energy, an unrivaled defense force and manageable technology. Call that configuration “the American middle class” for short: the house and the yard, the car, the aspirations to self-improvement. As AI, biotech and planetary-scale systems advance, that configuration starts to melt. The individual — as a philosophical concept within the history of the Western Enlightenment — is ending, digested like a lump of food in stomach acid. The human reverts to something older, more biological — to animality. As French philosopher Alexandre Kojève [noted](https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/kojeve_introduction_to_the_reading_of_hegel.pdf), humans will “perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas,” by which he meant they will exist in a state of idle contentment without creating new history.\n\nWe are rapidly coming to understand information about human bodies that touches upon our creation and would traditionally have been ascribed to a realm of divine knowledge — [maps](https://www.proteinatlas.org/) of human proteins, the [science of sleep](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11230563/). What are we planning to do with this information?\n\n**Joseph & Samuel**\n\nOver the past few years, I have not only tried much harder to care for my own body, I have also obsessively sought to augment the health of my sons. No to sweets, to screens; yes to athletics, to wild-caught salmon and green vegetables, to sleep, to love, to the best of schooling. And yet, I believe that we are on the cusp of major advances in AI, and that by the time my toddler-age sons are in elementary school, whatever is going to happen will have happened. What kind of human beings will accompany my sons into the future? Maybe not cyborgs, but people whose cognition is assisted by an ever-present, mystical companion? These children need to have a skill that I barely have myself: cohabiting with AI.\n\nEven today, many of us direct every minor health question — what’s this funny rash? — to ChatGPT and DeepSeek. Technology makes us more powerful and weaker at the same time, Sigmund Freud [wrote](https://wwnorton.com/books/Civilization-and-Its-Discontents/) in his essay, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” [about](https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/technology-and-the-human-person/articles/twilight-of-the-prosthetic-gods-medical-technology-and-trust) the concept of a prosthetic God. As we come to depend on it, we become ever more like brains submerged in tanks, surrounded by machinery.\n\nLittle wonder that the tech people I know want to keep their kids away from screens and out in nature for as long as possible; like a person trying to enjoy every day of summer, knowing that winter will come, they and I seek to strengthen our sons and give them the habits and temperaments of physical fitness, of exuberant human life. We know silence and screens await them in the future, so every ray of sunshine before then is critical.\n\nHumans are going to change — of that there is no doubt. What remains unsettled is who gets to decide what people become. There is no explicit social contract in China, but the nation feels like a distributed organism: metabolizing energy and attention; reproducing itself through language, norms and children; shedding some cells, absorbing others; mutating under pressure. Individuals are not sovereign within it; they are cells with partial agency.\n\nWhen Joseph and I pass the U.S. consulate on Huai Hai Zhong Road, I point out the American flag to him, and he tells me in Chinese that his flag is red and has five stars. He learned that from his grandparents. What will he inherit? A sense of self like mine, a sense that brought me from Charlottesville, Virginia, here to China all those years ago? Or a sense of the Chinese collective, with its systems thinking? My metaphysical anxiety or Chinese pragmatism?\n\nI think belonging to a “civilization” is a personal choice, and I am not exactly sure what mine is. I feel “at home” in Australia and England, and so I would tend to think that my civilization is that of the English-speaking peoples. But is my civilization [bombing](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/us/politics/us-strike-iranian-school.html) schools in Iran? How does a person’s sense of self as an individual relate to the broader spectrum of a society?\n\nMy children are not bridges. Bridges connect stable shores. My children, and all of the other [Hapas](https://www.janm.org/exhibits/hapa-me) of the world, are mutations; mutations are how organisms survive transitions. If my civilization survives, it will be in the form of certain habits and genes of my children. Much as my father was born in the British Empire, a world alien to me, who knows what parts of the America of the 1990s will seem real to my children as they enter a world that, not so long ago, we couldn’t have imagined. For many of us today, having children is not an obvious or logical choice, as it may have been for previous generations; it’s a conscious choice that in whatever future comes, our loved ones will find a home, will journey through the world and will not be destroyed by the journey. On the most fundamental level, it is a decision that we believe in the future.\n\nMy sons are better adapted than I to the possible coming world — where technology mediates the body; where no single national myth holds sway; where humans are fewer but smarter, stronger and more agile. If this world of the future seems like a jungle, that may be a sign that new life is flourishing. Wouldn’t a creature from the desert see a forest as being unnatural? I am a transitional form — perhaps necessary, perhaps already obsolete. My children embody a civilization that does not yet fully exist. A culture is an organism, and I am a particle of it. My sons, rather than extensions of my own consciousness, are where the organism is trying to go.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-ai-is-rewriting-human-nature", "canonical_source": "https://www.noemamag.com/how-ai-is-rewriting-human-nature", "published_at": "2026-07-16 13:52:51+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-16 14:13:52.753745+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-ethics", "ai-research"], "entities": ["Jacob Dreyer", "Noema", "Silicon Valley", "South Korea", "National Bureau of Economic Research"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-ai-is-rewriting-human-nature", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-ai-is-rewriting-human-nature.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-ai-is-rewriting-human-nature.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-ai-is-rewriting-human-nature.jsonld"}}