New World Same Humans #1
Status and shame at Davos. The truth about trust. Facial recognition and human nature.
Welcome to New World Same Humans, a new weekly newsletter by TrendWatching’s Global Head of Trends and Insights, David Mattin.
The great English scientist and visionary James Lovelock is 100 years old. Last summer he published a book, The Novacene. I read it a few weeks ago, while planning the launch of this newsletter.
It is, among other things, a window on to a remarkable life. At one point Lovelock remembers visiting the home of a Dr Hawking in the 1940s, when the pair worked together at London’s Institute for Medical Research. Asked to hold the family’s newborn baby for a moment, he briefly cradles an infant Stephen Hawking in his arms.
At the heart of The Novacene, though, is an argument about a transition from one geological age to another. Lovelock believes that we humans are the only intelligent beings in the universe (read the book to discover his reasons). But, he says, the intelligence primacy we currently enjoy is about to end. We’re moving from the Anthropocene into what he calls the Novacene: the age of inorganic intelligence:
The revolution that has just begun may be understood as a continuation of the process whereby the Earth nurtures the…
