“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.” Living in the age of cyborgs “The crucial step that started the Novacene was, I think, the need to use computers to design and make themselves,” he writes. 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.īut Lovelock believes that advances like AlphaZero mean we don’t have to look to the distant future to see how the story will unfold. 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. The first stages of the Novacene are already underway, Lovelock argues. It's an outlook that pushes him to conclusions at once optimistic and deeply disturbing.

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. 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. And unlike utopians like futurist Ray Kurzweil, he doesn’t envision humans and machines merging blissfully into a union that some call the singularity. Unlike technoskeptics, including University of Louisville computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy, Lovelock thinks it unlikely that our machines will turn against us, Terminator-style. But Lovelock’s bold predictions stand apart. These days, there’s no shortage of modern-day Luddites warning that technology will soon overwhelm us.

Cyborg Spell Shop by James Chalk