AI to become Earth's 'dominant life-form' and 'keep humans like we keep plants'

The Daily Star's FREE newsletter is spectacular! Artificial intelligence (AI) will one day keep human beings around in the same way we keep plants, a scientist has claimed. James Lovelock, the veteran environmentalist best known to the wider public for his influential Gaia theory, says that while Artificial Intelligence will inevitably become the dominant form of life on Earth, AIs will want to keep us around "like we keep plants in gardens." In his latest book Novacene, Lovelock predicts that the thinking machines of the future "will have designed and built themselves from the artificial intelligence systems we have already constructed". These self-replicating artificial intelligences will quickly evolve until they become "thousands, then millions of times more intelligent than us," he adds. But he says that's nothing to be afraid of, pointing out that computers – like humans – are threatened by climate change – so keeping the planet habitable will be as important to them as it is to us: "by remarkable chance, it happens that the upper temperature for both organic and electronic life on the ocean planet Earth are almost identical and close to 50ºC".