Why Electronic Life?
This entry introduces the Medium publication Electronic Life, which presents speculative writings on AI, data culture, imaging and the ‘evolution’ of information.
The publication title is in reference to James Lovelock’s book Novacene (2019)*, which offers the hypothesis that AI represents the beginning of a new epoch. There has been a lot written about the Anthropocene, proposed as our current geological epoch, dating from the commencement of human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Typically, the starting point is situated in the industrial revolution and leads us toward our current crisis of anthropogenic climate change.
The literature on the Anthropocene is often pointing to the need of a posthumanism, i.e. to think beyond the human subject, but the ‘anthropic’ in the term Anthropocene can suggest of an ultimate demise; ironically, the end point to life both caculated and determined on a human scale. Lovelock, however, wants us to consider the next epoch to come, the Novacene. This will be the time of machines, or super intelligent beings. The speed at which these beings will ‘think’ will dramatically outpace our own thought processes; we will perhaps be viewed just as we might view plants or pets. However, just as we live with forna and animals, so we might equally come to live with cyborgs:
…once artificially intelligent life emerges, it might evolve quickly enough to be a significant part of the biosphere by the end of this century. Then the main inhabitants of the Novacene will be humans and cyborgs. These are the two species that are intelligent and can act purposefully. The cyborgs could be friendly, or hostile, but because of the present age and state of the Earth they would have no option but to act and work together. The world of the future will be determined by the need to ensure Gaia’s survival, not by the selfish needs of humans or other intelligent species. (Lovelock, Novacene, 2019)
At this point in time, the Novacene is mere speculation, but it is based on sound analysis. Key to Lovelock’s account is a simple idea. One that is in direct reference to Claude Shannon’s elegant mathematics of probability, which paved the way for today’s digital information flows, and which in turn enabled the current statistical methods of AI. According to Shannon’s work (which was concerned with the reduction of noise in communications systems), we can seek to reduce probabilities to their simplest forms of on/off (ones and zeros), giving rise, for example, to the pixel and the bit as the smallest units of meaning. Lovelock refers to the ‘bit’ as ‘primarily an engineering term, the tiniest thing from which all else is constructed’; he suggests we might even think of it as ‘the fundamental particle from which the universe is formed’. Following which, the future world is one where ‘the code of life is no longer written solely in RNA (ribonucleic acid) and DNA, but also in other codes, including those based on digital electronics and instructions that we have not yet invented’. In short, humans are in the process of ushering in the new ‘electronic life’, which will not be a technology of humans but indeed a new species.
The articles collated under Electronic Life are intended to resonate with Lovelock’s Novacene, not to promote its argument per se, but rather to join the slipstream of its critical, speculative thinking. Some articles are practical, exploring current reports of technologies and applications (such as large language or image diffusion models), while others are more philosophical. A key influence has been my own research as a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute (2021–2023) experimenting with the relationship between structural linguistics and anthropology (see: structuralism.ai). A creative strand is also developed through the lens of literary and visual arts (see: The Alan Turing AI & Arts Forum; also: electroniclife.ai), which draws upon many years of engagement with image studies and imaging technologies (see: ‘An Ecology of Images).
Table of Contents
* Gavin Lamb, PhD provides a review of Novacene, placing the thesis in the context of Lovelock’s well-known theory of Gaia:
