Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (James Lovelock, The MIT Press, 2020)

https://www.amazon.com/-/zh_TW/gp/aw/d/0262539519/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1624016010&sr=8-1

The originator of the Gaia theory offers the vision of a future epoch in which humans and artificial intelligence together will help the Earth survive.

James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time, has produced an astounding new theory about future of life on Earth. He argues that the Anthropocene—the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies—is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age—the Novacene—has already begun.

In the Novacene, new beings will emerge from existing artificial intelligence systems. They will think 10,000 times faster than we do and they will regard us as we now regard plants. But this will not be the cruel, violent machine takeover of the planet imagined by science fiction. These hyperintelligent beings will be as dependent on the health of the planet as we are. They will need the planetary cooling system of Gaia to defend them from the increasing heat of the sun as much as we do. And Gaia depends on organic life. We will be partners in this project.

It is crucial, Lovelock argues, that the intelligence of Earth survives and prospers. He does not think there are intelligent aliens, so we are the only beings capable of understanding the cosmos. Perhaps, he speculates, the Novacene could even be the beginning of a process that will finally lead to intelligence suffusing the entire cosmos. At the age of 100, James Lovelock has produced the most important and compelling work of his life.

詹姆斯·艾夫萊姆·洛夫洛克，CH，CBE，FRS（James Ephraim Lovelock，1919年7月26日－）是一位英國獨立的科學家，環保主義者和未來學家，住在英格蘭德文郡。他最出名的是提出蓋婭假說，假定生物圈是自我調節的實體，具有能力通過控制化學和物理環境保持我們的地球健康。在他的假說中，地球被視為一個「超級有機體」（superorganism）。

嘉豐編輯