Book Review: Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence

According to Lovelock’s definition, the Anthropocene began in 1712 with the Newcomen steam engine which allows water to be pumped from coal mines. The availability of that dense energy source began the industrial revolution. In similar shorthand, the “Novacene” might be dated from 2017 when Google’s DeepMind produced Alpha Zero, a ‘superhuman’ computer that teaches itself.

James Ephraim Lovelock (who died on his 103rd birthday in 2022) is best known for his Gaia hypothesis, that the earth acts a self-regulating organism to maintain conditions that are favourable for life. The name ‘Gaia’ refers to the Greek goddess of earth, the mother of all life. This is a development of the ‘weak’ anthropic principle, that the universe is fine-tuned for selecting and sustaining life.

When I first studied theology, around 1990, James Lovelock was at least adjacent to the syllabus; whether Professor Lovelock was more theologian than scientist/engineer was a moot point. His point of difference from much of science was non-linear thinking, trying to describe dynamic systems, the earth being one.

The ‘strong’ anthropic principle, that the universe is bound eventually to have conscious and sapient life emerge within it, raises the pertinent (and theological) question of whether human life is the pinnacle. This book suggests that our role has essentially been to give birth to “cyborgs”, electronic intelligence.

Novacene, a collaboration with journalist Brian Appleyard, is Lovelock’s defence of his life’s work, but it is more. He makes a final leap of intuition and imagination to describe how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will give rise to cyborgs, whose electrical connections are theoretically one million times faster than human synapses.

Lovelock reflects on his scientific predecessors, noting Newton’s recognition that (linear) logical thinking does not work for dynamic systems – and so he invented the “calculus”. More widely Lovelock sees that the breakthrough moments in the science of Galileo, Laplace, Fourier, Poincaré, and Planck depended on intuition rather than classical thinking. He is very much influenced by the ‘final’ anthropic principle, that, since “information is an innate property of the universe … therefore conscious beings must come into existence”.

It is the cyborgs who may well become conscious beings vastly more equipped to process information. Many worry, even with nascent AI, about losing control, but Lovelock the prophet is sanguine: for only cyborgs “can guide Gaia through the astronomical crises now imminent.”

As a summary of his thinking to this point and a provocative prophetic glimpse of a step-change in evolution, this is an important read.