latest book, Novacene – a treatise on the future impact of Artificial Intelligence – was published last July. In it, he argues the world is moving into a new era which will be dominated by the emergence of superintelligent co... which will slowly but surely seize control of Earth from their human creators, and fuse with us into cyborgs. Far from viewing this as a sinister development which threatens a Terminator-style war between humans and machines, Lovelock offers a refreshingly upbeat view: that robots who will rule the world with our blessing and support, because they will need us just as much as we need them.
He decries our tendency to see technology as a threat, rather than a new stage in our evolutionary development – partly down to “the endless stream of stuff coming from Hollywood. It’s always ‘the cyber monsters are out to get you’. And I just think it’s time we changed that negative way of looking at things.” The rise of superintelligent computers has anyway already begun, he says, and will accelerate. “Supercomputers exist,” he smiles. “An iPhone is a supercomputer. It fits in your pocket and has wires just a few atoms thick. It could never be made by a human.”
“It’s just a short hop from where we are already to a world of cyborgs”, he says tapping his chest. “Slowly, imperceptibly we are all being dragged into a kind of mixed animal,” he says. “I’ve got a triple wire pacemaker in my heart and I’ve got hearing aids, so electronics is coming into my existence on quite a scale already.” He adds: “It’s nothing but advantage. It won’t be that there are monsters who are controlling us.”
Superintelligent machines, he adds, will help humans solve some of their most intractable problems – tackling a warming climate, providing sufficient food and resources and helping us to administer the increasingly complex urban civilisations in which we live.
They will need us to regulate the rest of the planet and perform many of the menial tasks required to keep Earth – or Gaia – in balance. Super intelligence will come to view us much like we ourselves view plants, he says.
“Plants are about a million times slower than we are, but the farmer doesn’t go out and get rid of them. We need them and it’s a good relationship. I don’t see why that shouldn’t be true with cyborgs.”
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Added by Michael Grove at 10:35 on February 20, 2020