Human

Related but an aside - Lately I've really been wondering if Skynet actually is the next evolution.

That humans, like all animals before us, are a stepping stone and there is actually no avoiding machine overlords. It happens to literally every existence of life across the universe because the final emergent property of energy gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines.

At least Fermi's paradox helps me sleep better at night.

If we assume that the many worlds interpretation has a basis in reality, then we can consider the following metaphysical angle. The evolution around us is our world line with the physical laws we are familiar with. And indeed the natural and inevitable progression of this world line is a machine world, just like a massive star inevitably collapses into a black hole, at least under our physical laws. However in the MWI, our world line may split into two: one will continue towards the machine world as if nothing happened, while the other world line will experience a slight change of physical laws that will make the machine world impossible. Both world lines won't know about the split, except by observing a large scale extinction event that corresponds to the other world line departing. IMO, that's the idea behind the famous judgement day.

> And indeed the natural and inevitable progression of this world line is a machine world,

Would you mind clarifying your line of reasoning for suggesting this?

Second: quoting wikipedia - "The many-worlds interpretation implies that there are many parallel, non-interacting worlds."

If the multiple words are non-interacting, how could one world observe a large scale extinction event corresponding to the other world line departing? The two world lines are completely non-interacting, there would be no way to observe anything about the other.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

It's the assumption that in our world, a machine civilization is an almost certain end. This might explain the Fermi paradox that we haven't seen other civilization in the universe: each builds an AI that decides to go radio offline for self-preservation.

As for MWI, I'm assuming that the world lines may split, or fork in Unix terms. What causes such splits is an open question. The splits cannot be detected with certainty, but can be guessed by side effects. Here I'm making another guess that inhabitants of MWI must be in one world line only, so when a split happens, inhabitants choose one of the paths, often unconsciously based on their natural likes and dislikes. But what happens to their body in the abandonded branch of MWI? It continues to exist mechanically for some short period of time, and then something happens to it, so it's destroyed, i.e. its entropy suddenly increases without the binding principle that has left this branch of MWI. In practice, one half of inhabitant would observe a relatively sudden and maybe peaceful extinction of the other half, while that other half simply continued their path in the other world line. And that other half will see a similar picture, but mirrored. Both halves will be left wondering what's just happened.