The Anthropocene, the age in which humans reshape the planet through fossil-fuel energy and technology, is giving way to the Novacene: an age dominated by electronic life that humans will have engineered but no longer control. This new age begins when machines design and improve themselves without human input, making them our evolutionary successors rather than our tools.
Future electronic beings will have a vested interest in keeping the planet cool and the Gaian system stable, because they are even more vulnerable to overheating than organic life and depend on the same biosphere for a livable temperature. Rather than exterminating humanity, they will likely keep organic life around as a necessary part of the cooling system that sustains them.
The coming intelligences, called cyborgs here, will process information so much faster than humans (potentially thousands to millions of times) that, to them, human thought and movement will seem as slow as plant growth seems to us. This speed gap, not malevolence, will define the relationship: they will regard us roughly as we regard plants, with a mixture of dependence and detachment.
Intelligent life may be the mechanism through which the cosmos converts matter into information and comes to know itself, making the emergence of understanding a cosmic rather than merely human event. On this view, humanity's significance lies not in being the endpoint but in being the species that first enabled the universe to begin understanding itself, a role we now hand to our electronic successors.
Lovelock dates the start of the Anthropocene to 1712, when Thomas Newcomen, a Devon ironmonger, built the first practical steam engine to pump water out of coal mines, converting stored solar energy in fossil fuel into usable work. He treats this single pragmatic invention, not a scientific theory, as the hinge point where humans began harnessing concentrated energy and transforming the planet on a geological scale.