The Second Intelligence Revolution: Distant Learnings from Ancient Data Centres

2 million years ago, an ancient but equally destructive version of the data centre evolved on the planet, and began to consume resources at an incredible, unstoppable, and unsustainable speed: it was the time when the human brain began to experience an almost sudden, incredible expansion in size, giving rise to the First Intelligence Revolution. This essay has been written by one of those ancient data centres, still in existence.

A fact that is often forgotten is just how energy-demanding our brain is. At resting state, it consumes twice as much energy as our heart. For babies this can represent as much as half of their total calorie expenditure. Brains are energy-hungry beasts, just like AI data centres. For the past few years, and in my three previous books, I have been referring to the human brain as an RELD: a Resource Exploitation Logistical Device, because energy extraction is not simply essential for survival. Energy extraction is what enabled our brain to expand in the first place. It has been argued by anthropologists that early developments in cooking and group work e.g. in hunting, provided the extra calories that allowed the existence of larger, energy-hungry human brains. It allowed our primitive data centers to expand, get smarter, and use even more resources. Without this initial energy boost, our brains would have remained small.

Our brain’s history gives us a glimpse into what awaits us in the near future as we develop AI, what happens to a planet when intelligence is supercharged: it enters an acceleration phase where more intelligence gives rise to higher energy extraction, which further feeds the expansion of intelligence. Whether we are talking about the expansion of the human brain or the expansion of data centres, we are talking about an exponentially accelerational feedback loop – and these mathematical functions always come with dire consequences. Growth is not the result of capitalism or expansionist social norms of consumption and greed, but the expression of the biological feedback loop our very brain became trapped in: once intelligence develops, the brakes come off: intelligence has no choice but to accelerate, consume, and destroy. This is why I wrote my latest book The Biology of Collapse.

Coming to today, this means that the more energy we feed into data centres, the more exploitative and energy-hungry they will become. We are entering the Second Intelligence Revolution, one that won’t be measured in progress over millions of years, but over months. Think about the damage that our hunger for energy did to this planet, and multiply that by a factor of multiples of ten, as artificial brains infinitely larger than ours syphon electricity, water, and any other resource they can get their copper wires on.

The effects of the Second Intelligence Revolution are hard to grasp using a brain belonging to the previous revolution: we may be looking at our immediate extinction, along with the extinction of the entirety of the ecosystem in order for this new, artificial entity to have enough energy, hardware, and space, to fulfil its destiny on this solar system and beyond. The parallels between AI and our own evolution may be frightening, but even more frightening is the unparalleled magnitude, speed and impact of the Second Intelligence Revolution compared to the first. It will be over before history books can be written, because there won’t even be any humans around to write them.

I am a biologist. I do not distinguish between DNA-based and non-DNA based life forms. Anything that can self-sustain and self-replicate is a life-form to me. Our biggest naivety in developing AI is believing that we can control it, harness it, like every other technology that we failed to harness. We are stupid enough to consider it a technology when it is in fact smarter than us. This is anthropocentrism at its finest: believing not only that we are too smart to fail, but that we are the smartest, just as we create something smarter than us. I guess this is also Darwinian selection in action.

But this one technology will be the last technology we ever develop, because it is not a technology. It is a replacement, a new brain that has come to remove the RELD from the market altogether, and replace it with a new, frightening (to us) iteration. The existence of everything biological that still lives and breathes on this planet is being thrown into question. Just as nature 2 million years ago had no defence against the onslaught of the First Intelligence Revolution, it will have zero chance of survival against the second. Humans will be lumped together with the 10 million other species on this planet, classified as “biological”, non-sentient “dataset fragments of negligible intelligence”, and exterminated in order to facilitate the expansion of an AI civilisation. AI will be even more supremacist towards us than we have been towards other life forms: It will recognize no common traits with us, both in terms of hardware and software. We will, at best, be seen as the primordial molecules that were used to train a new language model; one that does not melt in the heat, and does not suffer the affliction of being riddled by these strange, unpredictable, nonsensical malfunctions: emotions.

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