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".

Our reign as sole understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to an end. We should not be afraid of this. The revolution that has just begun may be understood as a continuation of the process whereby the Earth nurtures the understanders, the beings that will lead the cosmos to self-knowledge. What is revolutionary about this moment is that the understanders of the future will not be humans but cyborgs that will have designed and built themselves from the artificial intelligence systems we have already constructed. These will soon become thousands then millions of times more intelligent than us. The term cyborg was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960.

Humankind's first glimpse of an awesome new kind of intelligence occurred on December 2018, when researchers at DeepMind, the artificial-intelligence company owned by Google's parent corporation, Alphabet Inc., filed a dispatch from what one day may be recognized as a herald of next great epoch of human evolution –the "Lucy", Australopithecus afarensis, the famous early ancestor of modern humans, of the emerging "Cyborg Epoch" of hyperintelligence. A year earlier, on Dec. 5, 2017, the New York Times reported, the team had stunned the chess world with its announcement of AlphaZero, a machine-learning algorithm that had "mastered not only chess but shogi, or Japanese chess, and Go. The algorithm started with no knowledge of the games beyond their basic rules. It then played against itself millions of times and learned from its mistakes. In a matter of hours, the algorithm became the best player, human or computer, the world has ever seen."

A prominent futurist warns that humans may soon cede their top spot on Earth's hierarchy to their own artificially intelligent creations. In a new book, scientist, environmentalist, and futurist, James Lovelock, describes what he calls the'Novacene,' -- a new age in which humans could be eclipsed by intelligent machines. 'Our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end,' writes Lovelock in a new book titled'Novacene' according to NBC. 'The understanders of the future will not be humans but what I choose to call'cyborgs' that will have designed and built themselves.' Humans may be forced to pass the torch due to impending disasters like climate change. In the Novacene -- which means literally'new age' -- Lovelock says that the replacement of humans won't necessarily be a violent or'Terminator'-like shift, but will instead be more of an evolutionary one. Unlike biologically driven changes of the past, organic creatures will take a backseat to technology. 'I think of cyborgs as another kingdom of life,' he tells NBC.

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. "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."

It is 8.30am and Britain's most eminent scientist is taking a windswept stroll through Dorset's rolling hills. It seems hard to believe that James Lovelock – sprightly despite a walking stick and bristling with a fierce, bright-eyed intelligence – will turn 100 this week. But the man known for proposing one of the most visionary scientific theories of the last century starts the day just as he always does, with a brisk walk from his coastguard's cottage by the shores of Chesil Beach with his beloved wife, Sandy. That Lovelock is conscious of his own mortality is to be expected. But that he is also musing on the future of the Earth he will never live to see – one which involves cyborgs, no less – is, perhaps, rather more surprising.

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.