NOVACENE
THE COMING OF HYPERINTELLIGENCE
JAMES LOVELOCK
Allen Lane, 138pp, £14.99 Futurists have long talked about ‘the singularity’ – the point at which books about artificial intelligence will constitute 100 per cent of nonfiction publishing. As we hurtle towards that grim moment, James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, brings words of hope. Rather than a
Terminator- style scenario in which artificial intelligences wipe humans out and take over, Lovelock envisions a future of peaceful coexistence. The machines will keep us around because – Gaia-style – they’ll need us to help keep the planet at the right temperature. ‘Cyborg scientists may well exhibit collections of live humans,’ he writes. ‘After all, people who live near London go to Kew Gardens to watch the plants.’
Lovelock’s biographer John Gribbin gave it a double thumbs-up in the Literary Review: ‘if his latest book had contained the ramblings of a once great mind in its dotage, I would as a friend have ignored it. But because it is as important and accessible as anything he has written, if shorter than one might have hoped, I can recommend it with a clear conscience.’
No critic seemed able to resist the 99-year-old Lovelock’s greatgrandfatherly charm. In the Times, Martha Gill wrote that ‘I have never read a jauntier book about artificial intelligence taking over the world. It’s as if the writers of The Matrix had spent the film diplomatically refusing to take sides in the fight between machine and man.’ The Guardian’s Steven Poole applauded Lovelock’s ‘beautiful clarity’ and ‘characteristic mischievous wit’, finding it a ‘bracing corrective to the crypto-christian guilt and self-loathing of much traditional environmentalism’. Writing in the Sunday Times James Mcconnachie wasn’t quite buying it, but shrugged: ‘this is not meant to be a closely argued theory […] Lovelock on AI is rather like Lovelock on planetary ecosystems. The hypothesis might not be true. But it doesn’t half make you think.’