Cyborgs Will Replace Humans and Remake the World, James Lovelock Says

These days, there’s no shortage of modern-day Luddites warning that technology will soon overwhelm us. But James Lovelock’s bold predictions stand apart

For tens of thousands of years, humans have reigned as our planet's only intelligent, self-aware species. But the rise of intelligent machines means that could change soon, perhaps in our own lifetimes. Not long after that, Homo sapiens could vanish from Earth entirely, NBC News reports.

That’s the jarring message of a new book by James Lovelock, the famed British environmentalist and futurist. “Our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end,” he says in the book, "Novacene." “The understanders of the future will not be humans but what I choose to call ‘cyborgs’ that will have designed and built themselves.”

Lovelock describes cyborgs as the self-sufficient, self-aware descendants of today’s robots and artificial intelligence systems. He calls the looming era of their dominance the Novacene — literally, the “new new” age.

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