James Lovelock has a lot to celebrate. The renowned British futurist and environmentalist just enjoyed a 100th birthday party with his wife and friends. Over his long career he has seen his once-controversial Gaia hypothesis steadily gain significant acceptance among his colleagues. And capping all that, he has just published Novacene, a book that predicts the impending end of the world – but does so in a gently, almost loving style. Lovelock may be the happiest pessimist I’ve ever spoken to.
Optimism has always been baked into Lovelock’s worldview. In 1974, at a time of energy crises and political crisis, he came up with his signature idea about life on Earth, working in conjunction with evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis. The Gaia hypothesis posits that Earth behaves as a single, self-regulating organism.
Over billions of years, as the Sun has grown brighter and continents have risen above the seas, life has influenced the composition of the land, water, and air in ways that have helped keep temperatures stable within the narrow range that is necessary for biology. Without life, Earth might have frozen solid or boiled over; with life, it has remained just right. The problem, according to Lovelock, is that we are nearing the limits of what Gaia can do.
In another billion years or so, the ever-brightening Sun will overwhelm life’s ability to compensate. Long before then, humans may reset Gaia completely in a way that could spell our doom. That latter scenario is the subject of Novacene. Lovelock envisions that artificial intelligence will soon dominate the Earth (though he never defines “soon”—it could take decades, it could take millennia). At that point, AI will also take control of the Gaia process, an idea that I discuss more fully in a separate story.
At first, the AIs might collaborate with us humans to protect the planet. Over time, though the Gaia imperative will lead them in a new direction, refashioning the planet in ways that are optimal for synthetic life but quite possibly deadly for us. But Lovelock, for one, welcomes our future AI overlords. I spoke with him about his surprising embrace of humanity’s demise, and about his perspective on life after 100 years on the planet. An edited version of our discussion follows.
