Cyborgs will replace humans and remake the world, James Lovelock says
Cyborgs will replace humans and
remake the world, James Lovelock says
'Our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming
to end.'
By Corey S. Powell Aug. 25, 2019, 3:03 AM PDT
For tens of thousands of years, humans have reigned as our planet's only
intelligent, self-aware species. But the rise of intelligent machines
means that could change soon, perhaps in our own lifetimes. Not long after
that, Homo sapiens could vanish from Earth entirely.
That’s the jarring message of a new book by James Lovelock, the famed
British environmentalist and futurist. “Our supremacy as the prime
understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end,” he says in the book,
"Novacene." “The understanders of the future will not be humans but
what I choose to call ‘cyborgs’ that will have designed and built themselves.”
Lovelock describes cyborgs as the self-sufficient, self-aware descendants
of today’s robots and artificial intelligence systems.
He calls the looming era of their dominance the Novacene — literally, the “new
new” age.
These days, there’s no shortage of modern-day Luddites warning that
technology will soon overwhelm us. But Lovelock’s bold predictions stand apart.
Unlike technoskeptics, including University of Louisville computer scientist
Roman Yampolskiy, Lovelock thinks it unlikely that our machines will turn against us,
Terminator-style. And unlike utopians like futurist Ray Kurzweil, he doesn’t
envision humans and machines merging blissfully into a union that some call the
singularity.
Rather, Lovelock views the rise of technology through an evolutionary lens,
in keeping with his decades of research and thinking about ecological and
biological systems. He also brings the unique perspective of a scientist who
just marked his 100th birthday, with a deep awareness of changing scientific
fashions and with nothing left to prove. It's an outlook that pushes him to
conclusions at once optimistic and deeply disturbing.
The first stages of the Novacene are already underway, Lovelock argues. He
cites the example of AlphaZero, a
computer program that taught itself to play the game Go — and then quickly went
on to become the world’s best Go player. Today's computers can already process
data far faster than we can; with fully independent artificial intelligence, he
says, tomorrow’s cyborgs will easily become a million times smarter than we
are.
Lovelock imagines cyborgs filling every evolutionary niche on the planet.
“I think of cyborgs as another kingdom of life,” he says. “They will stand to
us in much the same way as we ourselves, as a kingdom of animals, stand to
plants.”
What would cyborgs look like? Lovelock is intentionally vague because he
expects that they'll rethink the basic rules of design in ways that we puny
humans cannot imagine. “Cyborgs would start again; like Alpha Zero they would
start from a blank slate,” he writes in his book. He speculates that they might
look like spheres, though when pressed he says, “It’s entirely possible they
would have no form at all,” existing mostly as virtual forms inside computers.
Whatever their form, the cyborgs will be so far beyond us in intellect that
they may dismiss us as part of the planet's background landscape.
Alternatively, they might appreciate us in much the way that we appreciate
plants. This possibility appeals to Lovelock, who likes to spend days in the
garden around his cottage home in Dorset, England. “Think about the way you go
to a great arboretum,” he says.
Once established, the cyborgs will remain dominant on our planet. “The
Novacene,” Lovelock says, “will probably be the final era of life on Earth.”
This isn’t the first time Lovelock has rocked the scientific world with a
big, controversial argument. His new idea about an impending cyborg takeover
draws on a sweeping idea that originally made him famous, the so-called Gaia
hypothesis that he and biologist Lynn Margulis developed in 1974.
In the Gaia view, our planet behaves as a single, self-regulating organism.
Over the four billion years since the dawn of life, biological processes have
steadily modified the atmosphere, land and oceans to keep Earth habitable. The
sun has grown brighter, volcanoes have erupted, asteroids have struck, and yet
our planet has steadily maintained the right conditions for liquid water and
carbon chemistry: the essentials of life.
Initially, many researchers took a dim view of the Gaia hypothesis. But in
recent years it’s become respectable.
“The concept of Gaia is quite key to our growing understanding about life
in the universe,” says David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist at the Planetary
Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State
University in Tempe, calls Gaia “a useful concept in stressing how biological
and geological cycles are coupled.”
The skeptics are back regarding Lovelock’s latest prognostications. “Nobody
knows how this will unfold, because we don’t know how brains work or what
consciousness is,” Grinspoon says. “And specific predictions about artificial
intelligence and its future impact seem to depend on specific, untested,
unverified answers to these big questions.”
But Lovelock believes that advances like AlphaZero mean we don’t have to
look to the distant future to see how the story will unfold. “The crucial step
that started the Novacene was, I think, the need to use computers to design and
make themselves,” he writes. “It now seems probable that a new form of
intelligent life will emerge from an artificially intelligent precursor made by
one of us, perhaps from something like AlphaZero.”
Once we get used to being treated like houseplants, the early days of the
Novacene might not be so bad. For one thing, Lovelock says, cyborgs and humans
will have a shared interest in protecting Earth from climate change, because
neither we nor they can tolerate temperatures beyond about 50 degrees Celsius
(122 Fahrenheit).
If humans fail to find ways to mitigate the effects of global warming, then
the cyborgs will need to do it. “They will, of course, bring something new to
the party, probably in the field of geoengineering —
large-scale projects to protect or modify the environment. Such projects will
be well within the capacity of electronic life,” Lovelock writes. For instance,
the cyborgs might cover large areas of Earth’s surface with mirrors to reduce
the amount of absorbed solar heat.
What will humans make of their robotic overlords? “I can't imagine,”
Lovelock says. “It must be a bit like a dog trying to understand a genius.”
They won’t have long to wonder. As the Novacene progresses, the cyborgs
might decide to remake Earth’s ecosystem. With no need for oxygen or water,
they might create a new world that is better for them but lethal for us. For
example, they might replace carbon-based life with silicon equivalents:
photovoltaic plants that generate electricity, or trees that bear batteries
instead of fruit.
With green plants largely or totally eliminated, oxygen levels would
plummet, and the sky would turn from a rich blue to a tepid brown. “Eventually,
organic Gaia will probably die,” Lovelock writes. “But just as we do not mourn
the passing of our ancestor species, neither, I imagine, will the cyborgs be
grief-stricken by the passing of humans.”
Given their complete dominion over Earth, the cyborgs would become our
planet’s final inhabitants. Lovelock thinks the Novacene could last a billion
years or so, until the growing heat from the sun makes Earth unbearable even
for synthetic life. At that point, the cyborgs might migrate to another world.
Perhaps they will eventually make contact with cyborgs from other planets
as well. Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California,
thinks the same scenario might already have played out across the universe. “I
think it’s likely that most advanced intelligence in the universe is
synthetic,” he says.
If this strikes you as a grim scenario, you’re not thinking like Lovelock.
“I'm now past a hundred and to have an optimistic view is the only one worth
having,” he says. Humans have had a great run on Earth, he writes, and before
we bow out, we’re engaged in one of the noblest things we could do: “We are now
preparing to hand the gift of knowing on to new forms of intelligent beings.”
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