Book review of Novacene

I was introduced to James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis at University in the mid-1990s. Even back then, his theory that Earth was a self-regulating biosphere, was identified by the ecological research community as “deep-green”. It wouldn’t be until quite recently that his work was to gain something of a renaissance, as we began to face some of the foreseeable consequences of a warming atmosphere. Slowly we’re beginning to realise that the planet’s heat management is the main threat to our existence. Here is my review of his latest book Novacene.

As I am still working on getting my book Animal Impact published, I deliberately chose not to reread the Gaia Hypothesis – in truth, I can’t recall if I ever read it cover-to-cover, or just studied sections in lectures. I certainly knew how relevant it was and I didn’t want to be influenced too much by a volume that would embrace many of the topics I’ve touched on. What I tried to do in the 12 months of research that led to the first detailed draft, was go back to primary sources as much as possible and construct a narrative using the individual pieces of my story. Naturally, along the way, Lovelock’s work was to crop up as a regular feature in those references.

So, it was with delight that in Christmas 2020 I was gifted a copy of Lovelock’s latest book Novacene, an insightful and concise summary of a lifetime of deep thought, augmented with an extension to his theories, forecasting the rise of self-replicating Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the next natural step in evolution of intelligent life.

Artificial intelligence: friend or foe?

Even today, the pace of development of this technology and computers that literally make copies of themselves, develop their own language of intuition and supersede human thought, is staggering. The late Stephen Hawking warned our generation that the rise of supercomputing could be among the greatest challenges for humankind.

Lovelock’s predictions are quite plausible within the architecture of a universe operating under the natural laws of entropy.

If you don’t think this is relevant to conservation, think again. AI is already being used to make critical global decisions regarding the environment and as a good friend of mine, Matt Edmunds at Australian Marine Ecology said, it’s possible that the conservation plans we write now with 30-year time frames could be redundant, if computers will simply take the actions for us in years to come. This is why there are whole global risk groups set up in what Forbes Magazine describes as a ‘Troubling Trajectory of Technological Singularity‘.

As Lovelock explains, why would an intelligence that thinks 10,000 times faster than us, bother with air travel?

‘An intriguing disadvantage … is that rapidity of their thoughts might make long-distance travel exceedingly boring and even perhaps, unpleasantly ageing. A flight to Australia would be 10,000 times more boring and disruptive for them than it is for us; for them it would take about 3,000 years.

Computers are already networked to manage air travel across the entire world. If AI saw climate change as a threat to its own existence and air travel as literally a waste of time, what’s to stop that decision being made for us?

AI – Artifical Intelligence or Animal Impact?

It was comforting to find Lovelock’s views broadly compatible with my story about Animal Impact … there were even similar references to examples of how things function. This sense of convergent evolution of independent ideas is always fun, because it helps validate one’s own views, while giving comfort that there are undoubtedly many others thinking along similar lines.

Nonetheless, towards the end of the book, Lovelock hesitates between a view that artificial intelligence can or cannot survive without humans. This is despite categorically ruling out a Terminator-style war with robots. Lovelock believes that AI, at least in the first instance, would rely on human beings to cooperate and implement changes needed to maintain Earth’s temperatures within liveable bounds (the effective liveable temperatures for machines and humans are similar). In fact, we’re at that stage already.

However, to get there, humans must be survived by machines. Lovelock admits, though in not so few words, that to last through the Anthropocene and into the Novacene epoch, will rely on humans not destroying Earth in the meantime. Even if you discard Lovelock’s futuristic predictions as science fiction, the need to protect Earth now, remains the same. We are allowing our planet to overheat quickly and this may be our undoing.

The importance of animals over plants

During my book review of Novacene was one thing I found particularly intriguing about Lovelock’s dialogue as on page 104 of Novacene:

“… the long-term threat to life on Earth is the exponentially increasing output of heat from the Sun. This is simply the logic of any planet illuminated by a main sequence star. The consequences of solar overheating are already upon us and, but for the regulatory capacity of Gaia, our planet would be moving unstoppably to a state like that of Venus now. What saves us is the continuous and sufficient pump-down of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by land and ocean vegetation”.

Lovelock does not mention the importance of wildlife in maximising entropy production, which is the “continuous and sufficient” part of his statement. I am curious why he left this out. Plants are powerful entropy-producers and will alone kill “planet ocean”.

Lovelock even makes a passing remark about the potentially disastrous consequence of planting trees. While he does not explain what he means by this, I would interpret this as the way land plants killed ocean life 350 million years ago, before land animals existed.

‘I think re-wilding and reforestation are worthwhile, but they should occur naturally. I know from personal experience that planting forests is no substitute and can even be harmful’

The ocean’s cold temperature is maintained in part by animals that are fuelled by the plants he refers to. It’s not the physical Earth or even photosynthesising plants that help maintain temperatures for intelligent biological life to thrive. Given that humans are an animal, other animals have been a necessary stepping-stone in the evolution of a cosmos that has led to humans, and therefore are also needed for the lead up to Lovelock’s Novacene.

if we were to measure Earth’s heat signature from a distant galaxy today, we would probably conclude it wasn’t liveable. These days, it’s only life on Earth inside our atmosphere that enables us to exist at all.

I am not sure what difference this makes to Lovelock’s overall thesis. It might strengthen his argument that humans are relevant to a future AI world. Or it may mean humans become eventually disposable, since an established AI intelligence could better maintain a steady state ecosystem simply by allowing other less self-aware animals to thrive–to do what animals did for millions of years before humans evolved. Only a stable pyramidal trophic system is needed for maximum entropy production to moderate atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature. That doesn’t require human beings.

Indeed, the rise of a new human-like biological intelligence might threaten a pre-established AI that has re-enabled such harmonious ecosystems. As Lovelock says, AI can make decisions 10,000x faster than a human. Biological entities are too slow to evolve and fix problems they create by their own entropy. For this reason, I still don’t understand how machines could hope to harvest sufficient materials for their components and overcome entropy, without effectively becoming biological, or depending entirely on a biological entity. The argument seems to become a bit self-defeating.

In his fantastical descriptions of future worlds, Lovelock misses out mentioning one with intelligent machines living among a beautiful diversity of animals.

The next stage of human evolution

I am always in awe of any deep thinking scientist and in doing this book review of Novacene, I’ve been able to learn from someone who has thought and experienced fifty years more than most of us. Lovelock’s views are concise, compelling and if nothing else, enormously thought-provoking. Even if you disregard any of his predictions as futurist and unknowing, there is a great deal of wisdom from his portent of our future.

Overall, the fact remains that humans need to survive one way or the other, for self-aware information-gathering life (organic or inorganic) to have any chance of lasting beyond the Anthropocene. This means avoiding cataclysmic overheating which would lead to a Venus-style atmosphere in which no intelligence can exist at all, human or otherwise.  

What would be the consequence then, of loss of all animal life today? Dinosaurs were wiped out by a freak asteroid but animals bounced back afterwards, because Earth was plunged into a new ice-age. Cool conditions restart evolutionary processes and create a whole new suite of wildlife. Lovelock explains that if we were to measure Earth’s heat signature from a distant galaxy today, we would probably conclude it wasn’t liveable. These days, it’s only life on Earth inside our atmosphere that enables us to exist at all.

Lovelock is a systems theorist and critical of linear-thinking and the idea Earth can exist without animals, that plants could reset a system alone, would appear to be a linear process. Whether you believe Lovelock’s Novacene concept or not, the immediate future of human life and a habitable planet still seems to depend on animals.

Thank you for reading this book review of Novacene. Here is a preview to whet your appetite.