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August 26, 2019 07:34 am

100-Year-Old James Lovelock Predicts Humans Will Be Replaced by Self-Aware AI

A new book by futurist James Lovelock argues "Our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end. The understanders of the future will not be humans but what I choose to call 'cyborgs' that will have designed and built themselves." An anonymous reader quotes NBC News' Mach blog: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... 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. Once established, the cyborgs will remain dominant on our planet. "The Novacene," Lovelock says, "will probably be the final era of life on Earth..." 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. 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... Given their complete dominion over Earth, the cyborgs would become our planet's final inhabitants.

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