The Future of Life is Machine Life! HAL & The Culture Riseth…

A few days ago I posted a long article entitled ‘Three Vital Things Cthulhu (and Lovecraft) Show Us About Biology (and Tentacles)‘. In the process of writing this I contacted Professor Ward, author of The Medea Hypothesis, fellow fan of Lovecraft’s fiction and I’d asked him about the death of the human species Loveraft predicts. I want to re-quote Professor Ward’s reply to me because it is mind-blowing:

“Long in the future, it will be the loss of Carbon Dioxide that dooms complex life. Then it WILL be the monsters of the dark corners – the Hydrogen sulfide producing, anoxic microbes – that will take over as plants die and then we animals die, choked as no more Oxygen comes from the greens. then the planet will need intelligence to save it. Will it be us or the AI that will come after us? One of my shocks this past fall was spending a week with Seth Shostek of SETI. In his talks he rather routinely announced that SETI was sure that anyone contacting us from space would be an AI. He sees all evolution finally getting there – natural selection will no longer make our brains bigger/better. But what I call ‘Economic Selection” will. We are the phase that builds intelligence.”

Yes indeed, here comes HAL and/or The Culture.