Novacene by James Lovelock review – a big welcome for the AI takeover

The Gaia theorist, at 100 years old, is infectiously optimistic about the prospect of humanity being overtaken by superintelligent robots

In an acerbic 1976 article on AI research, the computer scientist Drew McDermott was the first to contrast the phrases "artificial intelligence" and "natural stupidity". Four decades later, researchers warn of the threat posed by computer "superintelligence", but stupidity is still a far greater peril: both the age-old natural stupidity of humans and the newfangled artificial stupidity displayed by algorithms - such as chatbots supposed to be able to diagnose illness, or facial-recognition software that throws up false matches for ethnic minorities - in which we place far too much trust.

An alternative reason to be cheerful about the coming machine takeover is offered here by the eminent scientist and inventor James Lovelock. A chemist by training, who invented instruments for Mars rovers and helped to discover the depletion of the ozone layer, Lovelock is most celebrated in pop culture for his "Gaia hypothesis". First formulated in the 1960s, it proposes that Earth and its biosphere comprise a single, self-regulating system. Life alters its habitat (eg, as plants seeded Earth's atmosphere with oxygen) as surely as the habitat alters life. The hippyish name "Gaia", originally suggested to him in the pub by the novelist William Golding, probably worked against the idea (also called "geophysiology"), but modern disciplines such as Earth Systems Science have absorbed many of Lovelock's central points.