As just a ‘normal’ punter I’m not able to argue about AI and whether it’s part of human evolution or not. I just think that as we have it now and it was our evolutionary path that has produced it. The extended phonotype theory of Richard Dawkins chimes:

“Dawkins extends the idea of phenotype beyond the individual organism to include effects that a gene can have on the environment or other organisms. For instance, he describes how parasites can manipulate the behaviour of their hosts to increase their own reproductive success, such as the lancet fluke causing ants to climb grass blades to be eaten by sheep, the parasite’s next host. This manipulation is considered an expression of the parasite’s genes—an “extended phenotype”—demonstrating how the behaviour of one species can be directly shaped by the genes of another.”

Could AI be characterised as parasitical to the human species?