LRB, Vol. 43 No. 1 · 7 January 2021
Our Cyborg Progeny
by Meehan Crist
Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence
by James Lovelock.
Allen Lane, 160 pp., £9.99, July, 978 0 14 199079 8
When, as a teenager, I first heard about the Gaia hypothesis, all I
knew was that it was somehow connected to the Whole Earth Catalogue, a
thick edition of which haunted the piles of magazines and books lying
around our living room, easily picked out by the image on its cover of
Earth as seen from space – swirling cloud formations marbling the blues
and greens of our tiny planet. Later, I came to know Gaia as the
somewhat brilliant, somewhat bonkers idea that Earth can be understood
as a living organism – a complex, self-regulating system which acts to
ensure its own survival. This idea has new resonance in a time of
climate crisis, and in Novacene, James Lovelock, the man who proposed
the Gaia hypothesis (and who turned a hundred in 2019), has set down
some thoughts about the possible future of life on this rapidly warming
planet.
Lovelock, a prolific inventor and independent scientist who has done
most of his work in a barn in Dorset converted into a laboratory, began
to formulate the Gaia hypothesis when he was working with Nasa in the
1970s. Trained as a chemist, he had worked for the National Institute
for Medical Research on everything from cryobiology to the transmission
of the common cold, and had earned a reputation for his engineering
skills, specifically the design of instruments capable of detecting tiny
amounts of chemical substances, such as pesticides, in larger chemical
mixtures, such as the atmosphere. In 1957, he invented the electron
capture detector, an exquisitely sensitive device able to detect the
presence of trace amounts of certain components – in particular,
man-made chemical pollutants – in an air sample. In the early 1970s he
used the device to show that manmade chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, were
present in the atmosphere over Antarctica. It was discovered soon
afterwards that CFCs react with ozone in the stratosphere, and that this
process was creating a ‘hole’ in the ozone layer, which ordinarily
protects life on Earth from ultraviolet radiation. International action
to reduce CFC emissions followed a few years later, and stratospheric
ozone levels have begun gradually to recover. Lovelock’s experiments
with his electron capture device revealed that human pollution was to be
found everywhere on Earth, revolutionising our understanding of the
atmosphere and helping to spark what would become the environmental
movement.
It was while working with Nasa in the early 1960s and thinking about how
we might detect life on other planets by measuring the chemical
composition of their atmospheres, that Lovelock formulated the Gaia
hypothesis in collaboration with the visionary evolutionary theorist and
biologist Lynn Margulis. ‘The Earth has an impossible atmosphere,’
Lovelock told the BBC in 2019. ‘For it to have happened by accident the
odds against it run into countless billions to one against. So
something’s going on.’
The Earth, so far as all our telescopes and missions and probes have
been able to ascertain, is a strange planet. There is an unusually high
proportion of oxygen in its atmosphere, and given its size and distance
from the sun, the planet should be too hot to sustain life. Over
billions of years, the sun has been getting hotter as it goes through
the life and death cycle of an average star, using up its hydrogen and
emitting increasing levels of solar radiation. According to Lovelock,
over the last 3.5 billion years the radiative output of the sun has
increased by 20 per cent, which ‘should have been enough to raise the
surface temperature of the Earth to 50°C and bring about a runaway
greenhouse effect that would have sterilised the planet. But it didn’t
happen.’ Although the Earth has passed through hot periods and ice ages,
its average surface temperature has remained hospitable to life, in some
form. According to Lovelock, ‘Gaia does this.’ Since it began, life has
worked to modify its environment. All life on Earth (microbes, plants,
animals) interacts with non-life (soil, oceans, atmospheric gases) to
form a single planetary system, Gaia, that adjusts to change over very
long timescales to ensure that the Earth’s climate remains relatively
stable and suitable for life.
As an illustration, in 1983 Lovelock and the atmospheric scientist
Andrew Watson devised Daisyworld, a computer simulation of a
hypothetical world in which ecological competition between daisies of
different colours affects planetary albedo, or the amount of solar
radiation that is reflected back out into space – one of the ways in
which global temperature is regulated. In Novacene, Lovelock explains
how the simulation worked:
A main sequence star like our sun gradually heats the planet Daisyworld
until it is just warm enough for a species of black daisies to colonise
the entire surface. Black daisies absorb heat so they thrive in these
low temperatures. But there are mutant white daisies which reflect heat
and, as the temperature rises even further, these begin to flourish. So
Daisyworld is cooled by white daisies and warmed by black ones. A simple
flower is able to regulate and stabilise the environment on a planetary
scale. Moreover, this stabilisation emerges from a strictly Darwinian
process.
Scale up this model to include all the flora and fauna of Earth and you
have the system I have called Gaia.
In its weakest formulation, the Gaia hypothesis asserts merely that
biota has a significant influence over certain elements of the abiotic
world, including the composition of the atmosphere and global
temperature. But in its strongest version, the hypothesis seems to be
that life manipulates its environment with the express purpose of
creating the conditions for the sustenance of life. While it may seem
that where some see God, Lovelock sees Gaia (‘Gaia looks after us’), he
doesn’t say Gaia is God. He has never claimed that Gaia is sentient, or
benevolent, or anything so obviously woo-woo as that. Rather, he
maintains that all the evidence suggests ‘a planet bearing life will
tend to modify its environment and climate in a way that favours the
life upon it.’ As we have yet to encounter another planet bearing life,
we have no way to test this hypothesis.
When Lovelock and Margulis first published a series of papers on the
Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s, the idea was adopted by environmentalists
and quickly took root in the public imagination. But it also set some
eyes rolling. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were critical, and
scientists across the board argued that Gaia smacked of teleology or
even new-age mysticism. Can we really say a planet is an organism? What
if life just evolves and there’s nothing that actually ‘seeks’ to keep
it all afloat? Where does poetic language end and scientific hypothesis
begin?
Some have argued that Gaia may describe an effect – the result of a set
of processes, rather than the processes themselves. ‘Among the wide
range of effects that living things have on the physical and chemical
nature of the planet, some may involve feedback that helps life itself
to continue,’ Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote in the LRB of 19 February 2015.
‘If they come about, they do so as fortuitous by-products of the
evolution of particular living things.’ Andrew Watson, the co-creator of
Daisyworld, later distanced himself from Lovelock’s insistence on
self-regulation of climate as an intrinsic property of a planet bearing
life, suggesting instead – along the lines of the anthropic principle –
that complex life wouldn’t have evolved on Earth at all had climate
regulation over long timescales not been one of Earth’s properties.
Today, many see Gaia in the way that Stephen Jay Gould once described
it: ‘a metaphor, not a mechanism’.
Lovelock has shrugged off these criticisms, appealing to the value of
intuition (‘Without it, we die’) and the non-linear logic of ‘dynamic,
self-regulating systems,’ which, he writes, ‘wholly defy a logical
explanation that uses step-by-step arguments’. This comes across as a
bit hand-wavey and circular (you can’t understand my theory because my
theory can’t be understood by you), but any mention of ‘dynamic,
self-regulating systems’ is an invocation of cybernetics, and it’s clear
that the influence of cybernetics on Lovelock’s thinking runs deep.
Defined by Norbert Wiener in 1948 as ‘the scientific study of control
and communication in the animal and the machine’, cybernetics is
understood today as the science of the control of complex systems. In
both machines and living things, this means a focus on information
processing – communication, automatic control and non-linear mechanisms
like feedback loops – and the investigation of core concepts such as
learning, cognition and adaptation. At a basic level, a cybernetic
system contains a representation of the current state, a representation
of a goal state, and the means to take actions that will move the system
from the current state toward the goal state. So you and your cat are
both cybernetic systems, and your thermostat is too (its ‘goal’ is to
maintain temperature at a set level).
Part of what was radical about cybernetics was that it proposed a notion
of telos and ‘purpose’ that many scientists found a bit batshit but
which seems to have struck a nerve with the young Lovelock, who has
repeatedly ascribed his formulation of Gaia to an application of the
cybernetics of physiological homeostasis to Earth’s atmosphere. While
the term ‘cybernetics’ derives from the Greek kybernetikos, ‘good at
steering’ (referring both to the craft of the helmsman and the
governance of people), its modern usage suggests a blurring of the roles
of controller and controlled. ‘In cybernetics, cause and effect no
longer apply,’ Lovelock wrote in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
(1979). ‘It is impossible to tell which comes first, and indeed the
question has no relevance.’ Neither is it particularly important, from
the perspective of cybernetics, whether a complex system is a
houseplant, a human, a thermostat or a planet.
In the decades since Lovelock and Margulis first drew up the Gaia
hypothesis, research has revealed that however improbable, teleological
or untestable it may be, it contains a nugget of truth more axiomatic
than almost anyone would have guessed. Earth system science, which
considers the interactions and feedbacks among Earth’s sub-systems
(biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere etc) is now a
firmly established field of scientific inquiry and a widely accepted
intellectual framework for understanding the planet. And at the
ecological level, evidence has been accumulating that the links between
life and non-life are far more profound than most scientists previously
suspected.
We now know, for example, that the relationship between trees and the
fungi that grow on their roots and share nutrients with them – a
symbiotic relationship known as mycorrhizae – determines how much carbon
dioxide trees will absorb from the air, and therefore how much they will
contribute to cooling the planet (whose temperature in turn helps
determine which kinds of tree can grow and thrive, and so on). We know
that great whales dive down to the ocean depths to feed on plankton and
krill, then swim up to the surface to breathe, and to defecate and
urinate, releasing a nutrient-rich ‘poo-nami’ that stimulates the growth
of phytoplankton, a type of marine algae that pulls carbon from the air
via photosynthesis. When phytoplankton die, some of the carbon they have
captured is recycled at the surface, but some of the dead algae sink to
the bottom of the sea, taking captured carbon with them, which helps
cool the planet.
Which is to say, it is now abundantly clear that the physical and
chemical nature of the planet is shaped by living things. It is also
clear that humans are the single most influential organism now doing
that shaping, with the effect that our planetary systems are rapidly
shifting away from conditions favourable to an astonishing amount of
life on Earth.
Since 2006, Lovelock has written a string of variously apocalyptic books
warning about the dire consequences of our present path for life on
Earth – The Revenge of Gaia (2006), The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009)
and the slightly less dystopian A Rough Ride to the Future (2014).
Novacene continues in this vein, but also offers up an oblique Hail Mary
for the future of life: Gaia will save us. Sort of.
This is where the cyborgs come in.
It’s a hard time to be looking towards the future. For many of us, the
near-term horizon is crowded by the ongoing pandemic, student debt,
precarious work and the stressful circus of never-ending elections,
while the long-term horizon is hazy with warnings about the collapse of
global food systems, interminable war and the loss of a stable climate.
Already, the water is rising, fires are burning, forests are dying,
coral is bleaching, glaciers are calving, and living creatures are
winking out of existence at mind-numbing rates. As Bill McKibben
recently told the New Yorker, ‘we’re not playing for stopping climate
change. We’re playing maybe for being able to slow it down to the point
where it doesn’t make civilisations impossible.’
But Lovelock is here to tell us that salvation of sorts is on the way,
in the guise of super-intelligent cyborgs that will take control of an
overheating planet and cool it down so that life on Earth, including
themselves, can be saved. But first, Gaia needs to evolve. As Lovelock
sees it, Gaia has already gone through two major evolutionary leaps,
which can be understood in terms of ‘the planet’s processing of the
power of the sun’. The sun is key because, as he wrote in The Ages of
Gaia (1988), ‘the self-regulation of the system is an active process
driven by the free energy available from sunlight.’ Gaia’s first
evolutionary leap was marked by the appearance of photosynthesisers.
These were the first organisms to use sunlight to split water molecules,
thus converting solar energy into chemical energy, which
photosynthesisers used to power internal processes. In other words,
these were the first organisms to harness the energy of the sun to do
work on Earth. The waste product of this complex biochemical process was
oxygen, which back then was a nasty substance to release into the
environment. But Gaia self-regulated and life flourished.
The second evolutionary leap was made, as Lovelock sees it, in 1712,
with Thomas Newcomen’s invention of the atmospheric engine. In itself,
this modest apparatus doesn’t suggest the dawn of a new era: a small
fire heats water, driving steam into a cylinder; the steam is then
quickly condensed, creating a partial vacuum that allows atmospheric
pressure to push a piston down into the cylinder. Newcomen’s engine was
so significant because of the particular problem it was designed to
solve: how to get more coal out of the ground. In Britain in the early
1700s, coal production was limited by frequent flooding in the mines,
and something was needed to pump the water out. ‘Newcomen had simply
made coal, and with it energy, more easily accessible.’ Lovelock argues
that by enabling ‘the exploitation of a hitherto inaccessible fossil
fuel’, Newcomen’s engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution with its
attendant glories and horrors, including humans’ new capacity to release
massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, drastically
reshaping the Earth’s climate. Much as life on Earth rebounded from the
early oxygen dump by photosynthesisers, so too it might yet recover from
this carbon dioxide dump, though whether this will happen in time to
ensure continued human survival remains in question.
Lovelock believes that humanity has a fighting chance only because Gaia
is on the verge of a third evolutionary leap, which will usher in an age
he calls the ‘Novacene’. In the Novacene, ‘solar energy is converted
into information.’ This conversion of sunlight into bits will be carried
out by ‘cyborgs’, a term he lifts from cybernetics. As he envisages it,
once today’s rudimentary AI becomes self-replicating and self-designing,
silicon-based cyborgs made entirely of engineered materials – no flesh,
so not your typical sci-fi cyborg – will rapidly appear. They will
evolve according to Darwinian principles and soon become ‘thousands then
millions of times more intelligent than us’. In other words, the
singularity. But the singularity as viewed through the lens of Gaia. The
cyborgs will be our children. Our descendants. Our self-regulating
salvation. If they are to survive, these silicon-based cyborgs will need
planetary temperatures similar to those we carbon-based lifeforms need
today, and because they will recognise that Earth’s carbon-based life is
necessary to keep the climate stable, they will save it, using life to
cool down the planet and save themselves in turn. Once again, Gaia will
self-regulate and life – redefined to encompass our cyborg progeny –
will flourish.
To be clear, Lovelock is not suggesting that human civilisation will be
saved. It’s too late for that. In his vision of the future, which seems
to be rooted in a mix of fatalism, techno-optimism and wishful thinking,
it is a foregone conclusion that humans will not stop runaway climate
collapse and that without an intervention on the scale of a cyborg ex
machina, we are doomed to extinction. (‘Don’t you consider it possible
that we’ve had our time?’ he said in a recent interview.) With our
limited capacities, humans will appear to the cyborgs as plants now
appear to us – as a slower form of life. They’ll keep humans around the
same way we keep houseplants. The playful reference to photosynthesisers
is a nice touch, but it’s not at all clear that humans are necessary to
help Gaia control the climate, so perhaps the cyborgs will keep us
around for nostalgic reasons? Or because they have a sense of humour?
What gives the future-gazing in Novacene at least a dull glow of
optimism is the notion that the special human ability to understand will
survive our civilisational demise. ‘The distinguishing feature of human
intelligence,’ Lovelock writes, ‘is that we use it to analyse and
speculate about the world and the cosmos and, in the Anthropocene, to
make changes of planetary significance.’ This is a rather narrow view of
what makes human cognition interesting or unique, but Lovelock believes
the ability to understand – as he defines it – is special because ‘only
we do this, only we are the way in which the cosmos has awoken to
self-knowledge.’ In this scenario, the ability to understand makes
humans an evolutionary link in a much longer chain: cyborgs will evolve
to save life on Earth because the universe itself may be destined to
attain consciousness.
our reign as sole understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to an
end. We should not be afraid of this. The revolution that has just begun
may be understood as a continuation of the process whereby the Earth
nurtures the understanders, the beings that will lead the cosmos to
self-knowledge. What is revolutionary about this moment is that the
understanders of the future will not be humans, but what I choose to
call ‘cyborgs’ that will have designed and built themselves from the
artificial intelligence systems we have already constructed.
Gaia’s fledgling ability to understand, incubated in humans, will be
passed on to cyborgs that ‘will, of course, be far better equipped for
the task of understanding’.
The first photosynthesisers converted light into chemical energy to do
work on Earth; humans converted solar energy stored in fossil fuels into
work on Earth; the cyborgs will convert solar energy directly into
information which they will use to do work on Earth, and humans will
cede the world to a non-carbon-based form of life that will geoengineer
the climate and attain exponentially greater and greater understanding
of the cosmos. So the news from the frontier of human civilisational
collapse isn’t all bad! ‘We must abandon the politically and
psychologically loaded idea that the Anthropocene is a great crime
against nature,’ Lovelock writes. ‘The truth is that, despite being
associated with mechanical things, the Anthropocene is a consequence of
life on Earth. It is a product of evolution; it is an expression of
nature.’ The violence and ecological collapse of the Anthropocene isn’t
a wrong turn, a death spiral by which we have doomed life on Earth, but
part of the evolution of Gaia. The next evolutionary stage awaits.
Which is to say, this book is a bit nuts. The story Lovelock is telling
here falls within the realm of speculation, not prediction, which he
acknowledges with a generous peppering of ‘maybe’ and ‘perhaps’, as well
as some winking flights of fancy (‘No such assumption can be made about
the cyborgs of the Novacene ... But what would they look like? Anything
is possible, but I see them, entirely speculatively, as spheres’). In
this story, the Novacene is the next stage in the cosmos awakening to
consciousness, and in our current age of climate catastrophe it is not
individuals, or communities, or even human civilisation that must be
saved, it is the possibility of this awakening.
With its meandering and aphoristic style, Novacene reads somewhat like
a patchwork transcription of conversations and occasional rants in which
Lovelock’s wit and erudition, as well as his obvious annoyance at the
other humans with whom he is forced to share the planet, are on full
display. Academia and the scientists who work in it are particular
targets, behaving ‘like the church in Galileo’s time’. Maddeningly, the
book contains no citations, which would be only slightly less
troublesome if Lovelock wasn’t sometimes a poor purveyor of facts. As
George Monbiot pointed out in his review of A Rough Ride to the Future
(2014), Lovelock has supported erroneous claims cooked up by
anti-environmentalists that a ‘ban’ on DDT after the publication of
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 resulted in a massive increase in
deaths from malaria around the world. It did not. In fact, the US
specifically allowed companies to manufacture DDT for export and
facilitated its continued use in disease control. Malaria rates rose in
many countries because mosquitos developed resistance to the pesticide,
a problem Carson herself had foreseen. There are similar issues in
Novacene. For example, Lovelock believes cyborgs will appear as the
result of an acceleration of technological development at the
exponential rate predicted by Moore’s Law. (This development will be
fuelled, incidentally, by nuclear power; no fan of renewable energy,
Lovelock insists that our reluctance to embrace nuclear power is an act
of ‘auto-genocide’.) Moore’s Law states that every two years the number
of transistors that can be installed on an integrated circuit doubles,
allowing for exponential growth in the processing speed and capacity of
silicon chips. In recent years, however, this growth has shown signs of
slowing. But this doesn’t deter Lovelock, who claims ‘Moore has been
proved right,’ and breezily asserts that as artificial intelligence
develops, ‘the continued working of Moore’s Law means that ... big steps
will be taken in a few years, then a few months and, finally, in a few
seconds.’
One might be more inclined to take Lovelock more seriously if his
assertions were backed up with references, and if he wasn’t making such
strong, often eyebrow-raising claims about science and technology. We
are asked to accept, for instance, his view of information as ‘the
fundamental property of the cosmos’ and, correspondingly, of the bit – a
unit of information with one of two possible values, 1 or 0 – not just
as a substance on a par with any chemical element, but as ‘the
fundamental particle from which the universe is formed’. As Bruce Clarke
has written in a thoughtful exploration of the differences between
Lovelock’s cybernetic Gaia and the ‘autopoietic’ Gaia later formulated
by his former collaborator Margulis, ‘Reading information as substance
rather than pattern indulges information theory’s tendency to
hypostatise its primary entity. Information is given ontological status
on a par with energy and matter.’
Novacene is a weird, dissonant book, brimming with lively insight yet
locked into a Darwinian form of fatalism. Nowhere does Lovelock consider
the possibility that we might stop using fossil fuels and curb CO2
emissions fast enough to allow human civilisations to continue. He can
come across as sanguine about the prospect of vast human suffering.
Lurking in the background of his cybernetic techno-fantasy is a
naturalisation of the bloodletting that has occurred throughout human
history, and which threatens to accelerate in a not so distant future
shaped by the climate crisis. Lovelock seems to accept the violence of
climate change and of the policies we use to manage our relationship
with Earth as part of an inexorably unfolding natural process. Framing
history in this way renders events inevitable and removes the
possibility (and burden) of considering the suffering that a relatively
small proportion of humanity has inflicted on the planet and on the rest
of us. This framing leaves no room for justice. You can ignore politics
and power because, hey, it’s nature.
While fatalism has recently become passé among the climaterati, a
vigorous and sometimes vitriolic culture war continues to be waged along
the continuum between hope and despair. But Lovelock’s book, read as a
story about climate, departs along a different axis. Novacene is about
what is left once you have given up on humanity’s ability to curb a
runaway climate, but you still have faith in the future of life on
Earth. Lovelock offers salvation by evolution, and promises redemption
for what he rather bluntly and ahistorically depicts as humanity’s sins
against life on Earth. ‘Whatever harm we have done to the Earth,’ he
writes, ‘we have, just in time, redeemed ourselves by acting
simultaneously as parents and midwives to the cyborgs. They alone can
guide Gaia through the astronomical crises now immanent.’ As Lovelock’s
friend Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue and, like
Lovelock, a proponent of Big Tech fixes for the climate crisis, recently
tweeted, Novacene’s ‘message is more profound even than his Gaia Theory
and even more comforting and discomfiting’.
This reach for redemption seems all the more poignant when you consider
its source. ‘Also, perhaps, we can hope that our contribution will not
be entirely forgotten,’ the centenarian Lovelock writes, ‘as wisdom and
understanding spread outwards from the Earth to embrace the cosmos.’ A
charitable reading of Novacene is that it represents one man’s attempt
to make meaning out of his life in the face of a deeply held belief that
humanity is doomed. It is, in essence, a rejection of nihilism. Ever the
contrarian, Lovelock’s ‘last word on the Anthropocene’ is a ‘shout of
joy – joy at the colossal expansion of our knowledge of the world and
the cosmos that this age has produced’. Brutal as it may be, he’s taking
the long view. Because, as he points out repeatedly in the book, we are
doomed to extinction however the climate crisis unfolds. A couple of
billion years from now, the sun will be so hot that it will melt all the
ice on Earth and turn the planet into a scorcher not unlike Venus.
Eventually it will go through the convulsive death throes of any average
star, expanding to become a red dwarf, then tearing itself apart to
become a much smaller white dwarf about the size of Earth. Then, as it
cools, it will crystallise, eventually becoming a multi-trillion-ton
diamond at the centre of our solar system. All life on Earth will long
since have been incinerated.
Looking forward across this vast timescale, Lovelock seems to take
comfort in the idea that something of life as it evolved on Earth might
remain embedded in the cosmos. But maybe he’s right. Maybe our cyborg
progeny will salvage something of our existence, and we will all be
happier when, in the words of Richard Brautigan, we are ‘all watched
over/by machines of loving grace’. It wouldn’t be the worst outcome to
the planetary crisis we now face.
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