The evolutionary process is a search process for an agent that can survive and reproduce, this goal is instilled into humans as a reward function through an innate desire for pleasure.
Since humans have already conquered the survival challenge, we have learnt ways to achieve—an illusion of—more ‘pleasure’ in other ways (power, status…). It seems these other ways could cause extinction (war, cooperate greed in AI companies…).
Therefore it seems that we are the reward hackers of evolution.
A neat little idea from: Why AI alignment could be hard with modern deep learning