The father of the Gaia principle on the coming age of hyperintelligence.
BY JAMES LOVELOCK, MARCH 5, 2020
Our reign as sole understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to an end. We should not be afraid of this. The revolution that has just begun may be understood as a continuation of the process whereby the Earth nurtures the understanders, the beings that will lead the cosmos to self-knowledge.
What is revolutionary about this moment is that the understanders of the future will not be humans but cyborgs that will have designed and built themselves from the artificial intelligence systems we have already constructed. These will soon become thousands then millions of times more intelligent than us.
The term cyborg was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960. It refers to a cybernetic organism: an organism as self-sufficient as one of us but made of engineered materials. I like this word and definition because it could apply to anything ranging in size from a microorganism to a pachyderm, from a microchip to an omnibus. It is now commonly taken to mean an entity that is part flesh, part machine. I use it here to emphasize that the new intelligent beings will have arisen, like us, from Darwinian evolution. They will not, at first, be separate from us; indeed, they will be our offspring because the systems we made turned out to be their precursors.
Cyborgs may be the start of a process that leads toward an intelligent universe.
The term cyborg was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960. It refers to a cybernetic organism: an organism as self-sufficient as one of us but made of engineered materials. I like this word and definition because it could apply to anything ranging in size from a microorganism to a pachyderm, from a microchip to an omnibus. It is now commonly taken to mean an entity that is part flesh, part machine. I use it here to emphasize that the new intelligent beings will have arisen, like us, from Darwinian evolution. They will not, at first, be separate from us; indeed, they will be our offspring because the systems we made turned out to be their precursors.
Cyborgs may be the start of a process that leads toward an intelligent universe.
We need not be afraid because, initially at least, these inorganic beings will need us and the whole organic world to continue to regulate the climate, keeping Earth cool to fend off the heat of the sun and safeguard us from the worst effects of future catastrophes. We shall not descend into the kind of war between humans and machines that is so often described in science fiction because we need each other. Gaia will keep the peace.
This is the age I call the “Novacene.” I’m sure that one day a more appropriate name will be chosen, something more imaginative, but for now I’m using Novacene to describe what could be one of the most crucial periods in the history of our planet and perhaps even of the cosmos.
We shall be parents of the cyborgs and we are already in the process of giving birth. It is important we keep this in mind. Cyborgs are a product of the same evolutionary processes that created us.
Electronic life depends on its organic ancestry. I can see no way for non-organic life forms to evolve, de novo, on another Earth or any other planet from the mix of chemicals and in the physical conditions common in the universe. For cyborg life to emerge requires the services of a midwife. And Gaia fits the role.
It seems probable that organic life must always precede electronic life. Indeed, had it been easy for the components of electronic life to assemble on a planet, the rate at which such a life form evolves would by now have filled the universe with life. The fact that the observable universe so far appears barren strongly suggests that electronic life cannot form automatically from solar debris.
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