Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence

I really have no idea what to make of this new book by James Lovelock, which was released a week ago on my birthday. It’s very strange.

Let me start by wishing Dr. Lovelock a happy 100th birthday, which he achieved this past July. Wow.

All throughout my career as an environmental scientist, Lovelock was best known as the brilliant but potentially wacky genius who invented the Gaia Hypothesis in the 1960’s, which basically conceives of the earth as a single living organism. I think the theory of Gaia would have been better received, and proved useful sooner, had it been called a metaphor instead of a hypothesis. His fellow scientists got a little bit too wrapped up in the literalness of it all.

In the 1980’s Lovelock came out with a more obviously metaphorical explanation described by a computer model called “Daisyworld”, which I was taught how to use in college. And it was quite easy to grasp. The model explains how the earth could be using negative feedback loops to modulate temperature (and presumably other critical aspects also). It also, rather alarmingly, shows what happens when a positive feedback loop gets out of hand.

However hesitant the scientific community was initially, the more we’ve learned about the earth in these past few decades, the more appropriate Lovelock’s metaphor has turned out to be. By the time that I was in college, in the 1990’s, the idea that the earth self-regulated its own temperature using negative feedback loops was an extremely useful concept as climate change became more apparent.

We now are starting to understand that various aspects of the earth can pseudo-communicate with each other, by impacting each other, bringing about global changes. More and more, the single-organism metaphor appears to be apt and useful.

In “Novacene” he starts by continuing with his theme of global warming. But this warming he is talking about is well beyond the current issue of “we’re burning fossil fuels.” The warming he’s talking about is because the sun, over millions (and a few billions) of years, is slowly putting off more and more heat and it will continue to do so until all is obliterated.

The irony is, if it weren’t for the cooling effects of life on earth, the earth would currently be far too hot for life. Lovelock envisions life as caring for the earth, by helping the earth stay cool. Or really, actually, he envisions life as part of the earth, a cooling function of the earth’s. (Except of course for our very recent addiction to fossil fuels, which Lovelock thinks we’re going to figure out how to fix pretty soon, although he emphasizes that it’s pretty critical that we do figure that out very soon.)

Next is where the book gets a little over my head. He appears to think it’s not really us who’s going to figure out how to cool the earth; it’s AI. He sees us as the “parents” of AI, but he envisions that rather suddenly, at some point in our relatively near future, we will be absolutely and completely outmatched by AI.

He talks for a bit about intuition vs. logical thinking. So far we’ve taught our computers to think logically. He believes that soon AI will teach itself to think intuitively. And then we will no longer be the most intelligent form of life on this planet.

AI life, according to Lovelace, will probably not be biological. He calls them “Cyborgs” but he envisions it or them as purely electronic – silicone, diamond chips, graphene, whatever. He sees it as a new form of life. That life will no longer require DNA.

He is surprisingly optimistic about human future. He doesn’t envision the type of man vs. machine wars that we see in our sci-fi movies. Lovelace doesn’t really think that war would benefit AI. He thinks they will be smart enough to focus on cooling the earth. Although Lovelace is very unhappy that the majority of the money for the most cutting-edge AI is being supplied by the military, for military applications. Sorta not getting off on the right foot there.

He does believe that eventually – very eventually – life on earth will be entirely electronic. And that does mean no humans as we envision ourselves now. But we all know that’s going to eventually happen anyway. Even if we don’t manage to kill ourselves off soon, our star won’t live forever. But Lovelock doesn’t believe the end of the Anthropocene (the age of man) will come about catastrophically. It’s the most optimistic take on the “robots-are-gonna-take-over” theory that I’ve ever read.

And, Lovelock didn’t say this, but let me add my own two cents: Throughout history we have done a pretty damn shitty job of taking care of ourselves and the other organisms on earth. Wars, genocide, routine rape, maiming, murders, disastrous diseases, and the loss of about 70% of biodiversity (probably more). I’m grateful for antibiotics, painkillers and hot running water, and my own privileged life, but in general I’d say we’re basically failing.

Did you know (I didn’t know) that there were probably more than 100 million Native Americans in the North Americas when Columbus landed? And the new European diseases wiped them all out ahead of the settlers, before the settlers even got to them? So white history didn’t even know the extent of the disaster? The settlers thought it was mostly empty land when it hadn’t been?

I’m not blaming anyone here or excusing anyone either. I’m just saying, that totally sucks. It’s horrible. It’s beyond comprehension horrible, and it’s just one thing in our horrible human history.

I don’t really think it’s our fault. We are what we are. I attribute our failure to our method of evolution: the survival of the fittest. As long as it’s the survival of the fittest, it will be the survival of the strongest, most selfish and most brutal. I cannot imagine how scrambling to be at the top could do anything but create universal suffering. Suffering is built into the system.

Plus, we all die relatively quickly. And we don’t even understand why. It is not even biologically necessary. What’s with that?

Maybe AI will devise something better.