Are We Accidentally Building A Planetary Brain?

One Sunday in April 1930, actors in “little shiny pants” performed an extremely strange play in London titled, “Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth.”

A blurb summarizing the plot stated: “A Brain is constructed in the Sahara Desert — presently It grows larger than the Desert — out of pure mechanism, by the whole of the human race, It controls the whole activities and does all the thinking of the world.”

Written by obscure outsider Lionel Erskine Britton, a working-class intruder within London’s literary elite who had first worked in a factory at age 13, the play depicted the construction of an artificial superintelligence, in the form of a synthetic brain “creeping over the world.”

Humans in the play slowly lose all autonomy and come to function — in strict unison — like neurons making up one vast global ganglion. The play revolted most critics.

But Britton, an ardent socialist with Stalinist sympathies, openly celebrated this imagined future. While he was not alone in predicting something like it, others, by contrast, portrayed it as an oncoming catastrophe.

Whether they were cheered or chilled by the prospect, multiple forecasters imagined contemporary developments culminating in some kind of planet-sized brain that would perform executive function at an intercontinental scale, dictating affairs like a global frontal lobe.

This, after all, was not only an era of collectivism and roiling mass movements. It was also the moment when entomologists were first making popular the notion of a “superorganism.” Just as ants cooperate to forge an anthill — generating a whole far more potent than the sum of its parts — it became pertinent to ask whether globalizing humanity might — intentionally or not — be birthing a new form of planetary intelligence, fathoms more sovereign than any individual or national institution.

What follows is the story of how a century ago, forgotten voices foresaw the present dawning age of synthetic intelligence: envisaging futures wherein humans might cede their role as the apex cogitator and become subsumed within budding systems of nonhuman cunning.

More profoundly, their unease regarding the future of human sovereignty and solidarity rings even truer today. As our climate deteriorates and geopolitical stability crumbles, there have been renewed calls for planetary coordination and control, whether through geoengineering or governance.

We live in an era when pathogens and emissions make a mockery of national borders, when consequences cascade and harms are no longer solely local. Accordingly, disquieting questions arise again: Can liberty survive in an age of planetary risk? What might agency look like in the era of thinking machines?

Visions of a planet artificialized by intelligence are not new. Though the future will undoubtedly prove weirder than anyone yet imagines, revisiting some of the stranger tomorrows imagined throughout the past might help us better navigate the present. 

The Evolution Of Individuality

In the 1980s, the biologists Eörs Szathmáry and John Maynard Smith began theorizing that evolution has, over the course of its history, undergone several “major  transitions.” Each of these involved innovations in what counts as “an individual.” For example, the shift from cells without nuclei to ones with them; later, from single-celled to multicellular organisms; and later still, from solitary hunters to cooperating groups. Each transition, he proposed, produced more potent and complicated forms of life from the fortuitous integration of simpler, uncoordinated entities into a newly coordinating whole.

This entailed sacrificing autonomy for the previously individual parts. No longer the protagonist, they now became a mere means for the reproduction of the wider whole. Where their predecessors could survive and reproduce on their own, such skills now are lost. But, of course, there are benefits to foregoing solitary life.

Look to the mitochondria living within almost all your cells. Their forerunners were once independent bacteria: rugged individuals. Now they operate obediently as intracellular powerhouses fueling and furthering the body politic. If the mitochondria could speak, would they regret their change?

Naked mole rats provide another example. They are eusocial, meaning they cooperate and divide labor. Compared to other rodents their size, they also have minuscule brains relative to their bodies. But, as colonies they exhibit impressive feats of intelligence. Their individual lobes have withered because the true protagonist is the “brain” of the colony.

Evidence shows human brains today are smaller than those of our ancestors. Perhaps we are drifting the way of the mole rat? Regardless, it remains true that, from the intensifying aggregate of human activities, a sort of globe-transforming force results. Whether this can yet be called “intelligent” is a different question. But add machine learning to the mix — as AI systems web their way across our world — and it becomes a live question as to whether the supposedly sovereign human individual can remain the driving unit of history in perpetuity. Perhaps more potent wholes are bubbling into being.

Talk of “major evolutionary transitions” may date to the 1980s. So too does debate over the desirability of humans and AIs supposedly “merging” into one hivemind. But as Britton’s vision of the future shows, the basic idea was already simmering, generations ago.

Neurulating The Universe

Back in 1930, Britton’s play evidently disturbed audiences. One journalist attacked “Brain” as “too brainy”: a “mass of pretentious verbiage.” Another deemed it “pseudo-philosophical” and “totally unconvincing.” Yet another, clearly perturbed, resorted to snarking about Britton’s lack of eveningwear at his own premiere.

Britton was a proud proletarian who refused forever to wear a tie. He was the quintessential intellectual reject. Whilst working as a bookseller’s shopboy, he had educated himself, consuming classics with “grimy” fingers. Fingers that were destined, Britton later boasted, to “leave their mark in literature.”

Destiny failed to deliver. Britton gained resounding endorsements from cultural titans like George Bernard Shaw (whom he met at a 1929 conference aiming to renovate laws surrounding gender and sexuality). But, despite such support, Britton’s notoriety burnt bright but brief like a streaking comet. His subsequent publications bombed. Thereafter, Britton faded into obscurity and then oblivion.

But by calling into question just what can become a brain, Britton had stumbled upon an insight that, decades later, helped found the field of AI. That is, that cleverness is not a thing, but a function. It is a type of doing, not being. And, because it is therefore not a question of brute matter, nothing about a mind needs to be instantiated in flesh or circumscribed by a skull. 

All of which points to the question: can centers of coordination coalesce at scales larger than the human brainbox? Like it or not, a market is a kind of intelligence. So, given the branching of such networks across the globe, might we not already be building a planetary neocortex? 

Britton took this to its mind-bending ultimate conclusion. He conjectured that in “billions of years,” perhaps, “worlds too will link together” — becoming like neural relays webbing galaxies together — bequeathing a “soul” to the “universe as a whole,” making the entire cosmos into one cogitating nervous system. The British sci-fi writer Olaf Stapledon produced similar visions in 1930 and 1937.

Besides Shaw, another admirer of Britton was the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell, however, questioned Britton’s radically communistic vision, alongside his desire for civilization to become centralized like a cerebrospinal column. Russell pointed to the fact that our bodies are “governed not democratically but autocratically from the brain.” “Have we any reason to suppose,” the philosopher quipped, “that hair and nails like being cut?” When it becomes inflamed, we care little for our appendix’s “right of self-determination.”

But in the wake of the mechanized massacres of World War I, Nobel-winning scientists began to insist that our fractured world must become more coordinated. They warned that any species that begins meddling with atoms — without overcoming internecine belligerence — cannot survive.

Becoming Neuroblasts In The Global Cortex

Today, the French mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is probably the best remembered of those who argued, during the interwar period, that humanity is building a planetary cogito. But he was far from the only one.

Less familiar are figures like Oliver Reiser, who was a philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1946, Reiser published his “World Sensorium: The Social Embryology of World Federation.” In the atom bomb’s wake, Reiser implored the only way to survive was by “birthing” a “world-brain,” thus transcending “nationalism” with “planetism.” Despite currently resembling the neuronally decentralized “jellyfish,” civilization, he insisted, “must get a head.” 

The good news was that Reiser believed this was underway. He saw radio and radar — crosshatching the globe with pulsing information — as “electronic nerves” that were “proliferating — into a planetary net-work of intercommunicating ganglia.” In this way, he thought human individuals were becoming brain cells in an “emerging world cortex.” If true, rhapsodized Reiser, our species is but the “head-end of a giant embryo,” which upon carrying itself to term, will give our planet a soul. “Man is an embryonic god and our individual brains,” he marveled, “the differentiating ‘neuroblasts’ in the giant brain.”

Reiser borrowed the beatific phrasing from C.H. Rice, an obscure psychotherapist whose big ideas remained unpublished after he abruptly died in 1937. But Reiser helped posthumously communicate them. Rice had also compared intensifying global communication networks to how a brain knots within the developing fetus, sparking sentience. All living organisms, Rice claimed, will come to cooperate like “cellular tissue” within one “single huge organism” — with humans operating as the “forebrain.”

In private correspondence, Reiser and Rice excitedly exchanged ideas. They pondered whether reports of telepathy might be “feeble uncertain flashes” of the coming groupmind. They prophesied “starry-eyed” mindreading “mutants,” as harbingers of evolution’s next phase.

Their ideas were outlandish, often pseudoscientific, but Reiser’s admirers weren’t nobodies. Albert Einstein wrote him in 1948, professing Reiser’s outlook was “very near” Einstein’s own, though the physicist was “not inclined” to make this public.

Reiser also corresponded with Arthur C. Clarke, whose 1953 novel “Childhood’s End,” envisages planetary history climaxing with humankind’s final generation merging telepathically into one groupmind. This perfection proves deadly, however, as the energy released by the merge causes Earth to evaporate.

Planetary Cuckoos & Totalitarian Nightmares

Indeed, not everyone was thrilled by the prospect of following the mitochondria’s example. Reiser insisted his “world state” would function democratically, but reviewers detected yet another plan for “world dictatorship.”

In “Brain,” Britton had been brutally blunt, relishing individuality’s liquidation. But other novelists, envisioning similar scenarios, focused on the dehumanizing, disturbing aspects of such a transformation. Take, for example, Gaston de Pawlowski’s 1912 novel, “Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension,” a scientific romance envisioning a planetary hivemind emerging, unintentionally, from global flows of exchange.

Pawlowski envisaged this happening gradually and imperceptibly. Where once humans cooperated to achieve human ends, this synergy becomes usurped, generating a superhuman gestalt that silently subordinates its parts. A form of discarnate “life” coalesces, like that of the anthill. Although people originally made machines to serve human goals, it increasingly seems people exist to feed and fuel machines. Without noticing it happening, combined human effort slowly shapeshifts into mere means for the upkeep of this emergent, biomechanical “organism.” The perversity, as Pawlowski made clear, being that, though the resulting parasitic lifeform robs our species of “sovereignty of the world,” it is itself “unconscious”: lacking not only a definite body but also all subjective experience. It is a blind, joyless, vegetative dictator — a planetary cuckoo. Pawlowski describes this newly emergent “Leviathan” as “superior to humans and enveloping them like the cells of a gigantic body.”

Another forgotten, yet no less presciently provocative vision came from the novelist Paul Gurk. Titled “Tuzub-37: The Myth of the Grey Humanity,” Gurk wrote it from 1930s Nazi Berlin as a plaintive protest against Hitlerism. Written as a guttural prose poem, it paints a distant future wherein humanity has merged into one homogenized, centralized mass. All deviancy is expunged: everything unregimented and destroyed. Humans act, unthinkingly, as cells in one vast hydroid mega-machine, hellbent on deleting all vestiges of their organic, unruly ancestry: replacing flesh with metal and voice with univocity.

This is reflected externally in an all-out assault on the natural world’s remaining recalcitrance. The planet’s entire surface is smoothed. Mountains leveled, oceans filled; unevenness is considered ugly. The final reminders of our planet’s organic past are imprisoned in museums and then liquidated. For Gurk’s “grey humanity,” the ultimate, suicidal goal, of course, is “procreation of machines by machines.”

Crabs, Cables & Prophesies of Planetary Brains

But where did this idea of a mechanical “world-brain” come from and why did it emerge and take hold a century ago? To answer this question we must turn to the humble crab.

In 1838, two years after Darwin returned from voyaging with the HMS Beagle, a similar round-the-world expedition was launched from the U.S. On board was a young geologist called James Dwight Dana. He had been tasked with comprehensively surveying Pacific crustaceans. From this plodding work, revelation flashed.

As Dana studied these invertebrates, documenting hundreds of new species, he experienced an epiphany. He came to believe that all of nature — all living matter — is yearning to turn itself into a brain. Everywhere, he thought, evolution was tending “headward.”

Dana had noticed “carcinization”: the fact that several different crustacean lineages have converged, multiple times, on a crab-like shape, with their characteristic feature being an enlarged head. Over and above their ancestors, crab anatomy is marked by the attenuation of abdominal appendages, which tuck themselves away — like origami — underneath the engorging crown of the headcase. 

The evolution of crabs, from their shrimp-like ancestors, can be characterized as a headward surge: a ballooning that erupts forth from the face in exaggerated arrays of mandibles and pincers. In 1852, Dana called this “cephalization.”

Dana thought he had found an ironclad “law” of evolution, explaining universal trends across life’s tree. This was motivated by an uninspected assumption, then widespread, that organic evolution — rather than branching aimlessly — must tend in some direction toward “one far-off divine event,” as Alfred Tennyson poetically put it. That event, for Dana, was the bulbing of ever-bigger brains.

Of course, this was nothing other than self-compliment: assuming that heavy-headed creatures, like us, are best; and that, therefore, the whole animal kingdom is striving to become us. He was finding patterns he wanted to see. To make the evidence fit, Dana made all nature submit.

Though Darwin dismissed Dana’s theory as “madness,” it took hold. It even motivated Dana to baptize a new geologic age. In 1864, he proclaimed Earth had entered the “Era of Mind.” In his eyes, where all prior evolution resembled a building of energy in a bulging cranium, this was now spilling outward, reorganizing nature at planetary scale. Humans, as Earth’s brainiest beast, were now the dominant geologic force.

Directly inspired by Dana’s “cephalization” theory, other geologists, in the following decades, agreed. Multiple titles were proposed for this new geologic era, but the term “Psychozoic Age” caught hold: describing that era wherein living matter’s flows are dictated primarily by mental forces. As one of Dana’s colleagues put it, a time typified by “increasing dominance” of the “cerebrum” over all else.

People started searching for evidence of this. An obvious place to look was the burgeoning telegraph network. Mid-19th century, the first transatlantic cables were laid undersea: connecting twain continents like brain hemispheres. In 1877, one German philosopher, Ernst Kapp,  pointed out how uncannily telegraph cables resemble nerve fibers. He wasn’t the only one making such comparisons. It seemed the planet itself was cephalizing.

This, of course, was an era smitten with damaging myths of inexorable progress. Accordingly, the dawning “Psychozoic” was only ever couched in triumphant tones. Few voices highlighted any real potential for environmental downsides. 

European writers, invariably, heralded the “Psychozoic” as evolution’s inevitable culmination. Predictably, they positioned themselves at its pinnacle, whilst callously celebrating the destruction of “wild” ecosystems as implacably part of the process.

What’s more, as the 1900s opened, the world remained naïve to the truer evils of totalitarian rule. Hence, why Britton could so openly long for individuality’s abolition, alongside the suffocation of Earth’s surface by a gigantic computer.

Termite Kings & Embryonic Gods

But philosophers like Kapp — musing on telegraph networks — were not the only ones noticing brains in peculiar places. This takes us from crabs to termites.

From 1905 onward, the South African polymath Eugène Marais spent days wandering the wilderness near Pretoria. Another outsider, Marais struggled with morphine addiction. But he found clarity on the veld. Here, he familiarized himself with the teeming life of termitaries, towering like smokestacks above the scrub.

Marais realized the termitary is “a single animal.” Instead of having organs sealed in situ by skin, like us, its vital parts moved freely as swarms. Its workers, Marais argued, are the colony’s bloodstream; its soldiers the immune system; domesticated fungi the digestive organs. Marais even compared hopeful queens, flying from the mound in their millions, to spermatozoa.

Though Marais was among the first to describe this truth, his contribution remains overlooked. He published in Afrikaans: a language then derogatorily dismissed. When a celebrated Belgian writer plagiarized his ideas, producing a bestseller in the process, Marais’s addiction spiraled. He took his life in 1936.

It fell to the American entomologist William Morton Wheeler to popularize the “superorganism” idea. He used the word first during a whimsical 1919 speech, pretending to read letters received from a termite king, who wrote to him to justify the ways of insects to man.

Further, Wheeler presaged biologist Maynard Smith by implying evolution itself can be summarized as the production of increasingly complex wholes via the integration of previously disparate parts.

Inevitably, people applied these ideas to humanity’s own future. In 1920, the American zoologist William Patten rapturously announced the nativity of a “giant organism,” birthed from globalization’s “quickening maelstrom.” An “infant monster,” sweeping up everything, from rainforests to refineries, integrating them as its organs: a continent-spanning amoeba, “metabolizing iron and coil, sunlight and soil,” extending its industrial tendrils through “land and sea and air.” When, Patten asked, might this baby superorganism become self-aware?

But Wheeler’s anthill research also ominously revealed just how much sacrifice is involved in eusociality. He noted that worker ants have ceded wings, fertility and all the organs of “independent viability” their ancestors once enjoyed. Compared to their solitary forebears, their brains shrink and sense-organs wither.  They no longer need them, for they are no longer rugged individuals, but “cells” serving a wider whole. Wheeler, and others, shuddered at the prospect that humanity may be drifting in the direction of the ant.

Planets Create Life, Life Creates Planets

The darker side of visions like Britton’s was thus coming to light. So too, after World War I’s devastating spasm, it was becoming more obvious that the Psychozoic Age’s coming-to-term would not be free from ecological birth pangs. Here, we turn to another type of swarm.

In 1889, Nature published an eyewitness account of a locust cloud above the Red Sea, enormous enough to block sunlight. The author estimated it contained 24,000,000,000,000 organisms and weighed 43,000,000,000 tons.

When a young Russian mineralogist called Vladimir Vernadsky read this account, it transformed his worldview. Vernadsky realized the swarm was best thought of as analogical “to a moving rock formation endowed with free energy”: a geophysical event.

This event triggered in Vernadsky a lifelong determination to reveal how planets not only create life, but how life, in turn, creates planets. He demonstrated that life is a colossal agent of planetary change, by proving just how much of Earth’s matter is produced by biology.

However, during World War I, Vernadsky became additionally convinced that, just as life’s emergence radically reorganized the geosphere, human intelligence would fundamentally reorganize the biosphere. He saw the Great War as “a geological, and not just a historical, event.”

Accordingly, having acknowledged the theories of “cephalization” and “the Psychozoic” as inspirations, Vernadsky announced the inauguration of a new “layer” to the Earth system, one dictated by the actions of thinking life. He called this the “Noosphere”: a planetary shell of thought. 

Vernadsky developed these ideas in conversation with Teilhard throughout the 1920s. The latter believed that “everything that rises must converge”: that all evolution tends toward one grand unification, which will manifest the divine spirit itself. Teilhard believed nothing could stop this culmination, not even planetary catastrophe.

In contrast to Teilhard’s spiritualism, Vernadsky was far more materialistic. He pointed to the increasing burden of “artificial chemical compounds” in the Earth system, alongside how humankind now creates “new species,” smudging the distinctions between synthetic and natural.

Nonetheless, Vernadsky, too, ultimately rejected the possibility that the baby noosphere could derail its own destiny. Looking back on his career during World War II’s climax, he couldn’t dismiss the fact that his fledging “thinking superstratum” had descended into a yet more omnidestructive spasm.

Back in the 1920s, Vernadsky had anticipated the calamitous potentials of nuclear energy. Presciently, in untranslated essays, he foresaw the planet hurtling toward a “great turning point”: the unbottling of atomic energy. He questioned whether this would lead to “self-destruction.”

So, writing from 1943, on the brink of the aggressive deployment of subatomic forces, did our Seer of the Noosphere entertain the possibility of catastrophe? He didn’t. Just like Dana, Vernadsky based this on perceived evolutionary inevitability. Biology had spent eons groaning and travailing its way from amoeba to ape to human hivemind. Given seemingly unbroken “progress” throughout this past, Vernadsky concluded that contemporary fears of extinction were overblown. The flowering “Noosphere,” he protested, “is not a contingent phenomenon — its roots are extremely deep.” 

Elsewhere, in letters, Vernadsky reaffirmed this confidence. The Noosphere’s “formation was inevitable,” geologically speaking, and “cannot be changed by the ‘accidents’ of human history — by individuals or trends.”

Draining Earth’s Oceans

This triumphant tone persisted well into the 1900s. Particularly so when it came to early proposals about the intentional control of the global climate. Soviet scientists provided many exemplary cases. Perhaps the most shocking came from Boris Petrovich Weinberg, a physicist and pioneer of the maglev train, which floats on electromagnets rather than rolling on wheels.

In 1927, Weinberg published a scientific fantasy in an obscure Siberian journal titled “On the Twenty-Thousandth Anniversary of the Comment of Ocean Destruction Projects.” It recounts humankind’s prehistory and history from the perspective of the distant future.

From the vantage of 23,000 AD, we learn that history’s sweep is most sensibly periodized in terms of the extent of intentional control over Earth’s systems. We learn that “partial improvements to Earth’s surface” were initiated in the 1700s, but that “major works” began around 2000.

This was when attention turned to the ¾ of Earth’s surface “useless from the perspective of habitation and cultivation” — its oceans. Eventually, the “Earth Improvement Committee” decided to fix this, and “in 2007, founded the Special Department for the Eradication of Oceans.” You read that correctly.

Thus, the multigenerational task of draining Earth’s oceans begins. Weinberg passes blithely over minor “climactic” alterations occurring during this period. Geoengineering is deployed to smooth out aberrant weather. Eventually, around 10,000 AD, oceans are eradicated planetwide. With Earth completely drained, the world’s entire surface can be leveled and cultivated. The human population reaches 280 billion; nations and languages merge, wars cease. Planetary communism flourishes.

Weinberg reports only a vanishing fraction of nonhuman species have been “preserved,” globally relegated to “80 nature reserves.” But, we learn, various artificial simulations more than “compensate for the almost complete absence over the last 10,000 years of that “communication with nature,” which many people of former times considered happiness’s main source.” 

Tellingly, Vernadsky himself once referred to Weinberg’s vision as a “utopia.”

Painting Greenland Black

Weinberg wasn’t alone. As late as 1940, the Russian agronomist Viktor Alexandrovich Sytin (who had himself spent time studying locust swarms) proposed we paint Greenland black, using a fleet of 10,000 airplanes. No longer reflecting sunlight, but instead absorbing it, this would melt Greenland’s icecap, thus hastening the “liquidation of the Arctic.” Sytin pictured hotter summers globally, creating more arable land and greater harvests for hungering humanity.

Such schemes shock us today. We now appreciate Earth’s climate is in fragile balance. But, not long ago, this was not so. Humanity may indeed have started reorganizing its planet. So far, though, this seems better described not as planetary sapience, but as planetary stupidity.

Yet how could it have been any other way? No one is born wise. All education requires episodes of errancy. You cannot become correct without previously being wrong.

Amid our anthropogenic climate calamity, it can be tempting to condemn all things “artificial.” But this misses something vital. The mere fact that we are aware of our planetary footprint is a colossal achievement, the proportions of which are only put into relief by retracing the mountain of errors from which the current consensus was necessarily forged.

What’s more, the fact that our technologies have tended so far to perturb the world might simply be evidence of their crudeness. Since the Industrial Revolution, technological advance has been tightly coupled with environmental destabilization. But who’s to say that what’s held true for fewer than three paltry centuries dictates the trajectory of all possible futures? What’s more, recent trends like biocomputing imply this coupling might be reversing: by weaving nature and technology intimately together, causing convergence rather than divergence of the two. After all, truly sophisticated technologies wouldn’t disrupt nature’s preexisting complexities — like dark, satanic mills — but would work with and through them.

Ultimately, the artificial isn’t distinct from the natural but one of its products. Currently, our technological civilization acts parasitically on the biosphere that birthed it. But symbiotic futures seem plausible. Perhaps the ultimate symbiosis imaginable would be what Polish polymath Stanisław Lem called the “psychozoicization” of the entire cosmic volume in some distant future.

Meanwhile, our kind’s perennial capacity for stupidity provides good argument for retaining some of the present’s semi-anarchic state. An ocean of smaller errors might be more tolerable than the folly of one world brain, unilaterally unleashing its ignorance on the face of the world.

There is, moreover, an unexplored spectrum yawning between our current chaos and full-fledged world government. Some now innovatively imagine systems of “planetary subsidiarity”: where powers are carefully delegated down to the lowest workable level.

But what of the stranger futures for sovereignty? Centralization and its discontents represent a tension cleaving all the cumulated strata of this organic world — from the earliest eukaryote through all later, superadded layers. It dictates even the topsoil we call “politics.” As Russell noted, we benefit from identifying with brains that run bodies despotically — just as our immune systems don’t care for the individual liberties of cancer cells —  but this doesn’t warrant that our societies should be organized like this. Nature cannot teach us how we ought to act.

On the one hand, I am a human. I don’t want our kind — free to fall, though sufficient to stand — to march the way of the mitochondria. (Though, of course, one must imagine the mole rat happy.) On the other hand, it seems chauvinistic to think that “the human individual” is the unsurpassable final word on agency in this world. After all, it is a category only invented in the last blink of planetary history. I’d like to keep an open mind: to the potential for other agential wholes to bubble forth, beyond the brain pan, while also acknowledging authoritarianism — of the anthropogenic sort — is never the way.

Perhaps true agency hasn’t yet been tried. Perhaps we ought to think of it as a guiding ideal toward which complex collectives aspire, rather than some well-established fact of our world.

Agency, after all, is difficult to pin down. Indeed, when we express opinions, we assume we are acting transparently with intent But is it so simple? After all, humans no longer compete with other organisms for survival, so the interesting competition — and thus evolution — now unfolds elsewhere. Rather than humans vying against other species, it is now our ideas that compete for the resources of the human mind: namely, our attention. In this way, in our algorithmic day, we have become pollinators of memes, which in turn terraform our tastes as they compete and thus evolve in unpredictable ways. The bee shapes the orchid; the orchid shapes the bee. Never has it been truer to say that ideas have people, rather than people have ideas. Can we guarantee our interests and theirs forever coincide?

From Planetary Stupidity To Planetary Sapience

For Britton’s part, having visited his beloved Soviet Union in 1935, he returned disillusioned, realizing utopia is a deceptive dream. He died, forgotten, by the seaside in 1971.

“Brain” also finished on a somber note. The play concludes with the titular world-cogito drifting through space, before colliding with a wandering star. In its final moments, the superintelligence laments the opportunities squandered, picturing what wonders could have been achieved had humankind collectivized sooner.

For our part, today, it’s too early to reject the suggestion that we are living in the prehistory of true planetary intelligence. Nor should we dismiss the hope that our descendants may one day inaugurate an epoch worthy of the name “Psychozoic.” But we should acknowledge that the pathway, from here to there, won’t be smooth. Plenty more folly will surely unfold before planetary wisdom can be birthed.