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Gaia Wakes presents a compelling new framework for understanding the past, present, and future of our planet. Starting from a strong foundation in economics and drawing on a vast range of multidisciplinary scholarship, Topher McDougal explores the possibility of a fifth transition towards an upgraded Earth: the development of a technologically enabled planetary brain capable of coordinating ecological functions and peering far into the future and universe.
Gaia Wakes endows the emergence of a planetary brain with both a plausible economic mechanism and a historical context in which that mechanism has operated over the course of 3.8 billion years of life on Earth. It argues that the global environmental devastation we are beginning to experience and rapid recent advancements in artificial intelligence may jointly be part of a naturally recurring cycle of “upgrades” that has driven the increasing complexity of life on Earth.
Ambitious and provocative, the author combines economics with a breathtaking range of subjects including futurism, technology, philosophy, ecology and planetary and environmental sciences to offer new insights into questions that have long challenged us about the relationship between humankind and the world in which we live. Gaia Wakes stands out as a bold and original perspective on the future of our planet.
Amidst prevailing doom and gloom about the future of the planet, there is a hunger for outside-the-box ideas that provide some sense of hope – for a future that is different from the one we dread. In this exceptionally original and ambitious book, Topher McDougal provides a vision for such a future. Gaia Wakes traverses and synthesizes vast ranges of knowledge to present a new intellectual framework for understanding the past, present, and future of planet Earth and the place of our species in it. At once analytic and speculative, the book will provoke readers to consider the possibility that we might one day have a technologically enabled planetary-scale brain and mind.
Introduction: emergence
1. A Map to the Next World
2. An Enterprise for Zealots
3. The First Five Worlds
4. The Age of Gilgamesh
5. The Logic of Coordination
6. Gaianous
7. An Economy of Enormity
8. Peace with Earth
9. Perfect, not Immutable
Appendices