The latest planetary boundaries assessment finds that seven of nine boundaries have been crossed.

Natural and artificial intelligences bring different strengths to the task of understanding the world.

Natural general intelligence could help AI become more responsive to the planet.

Our capacity to generate knowledge and intervene in the world is expanding faster than our ability to understand the consequences. Artificial intelligence (AI) can detect patterns across vast datasets, assist scientific discovery, and model complex processes. Yet the latest planetary boundaries assessment finds that seven of nine boundaries have been crossed. Climate, biodiversity, freshwater, land use, and ocean chemistry are changing through interacting pressures that no single discipline, institution, or technology can adequately address. The contradiction is striking: As our instruments become more capable, the systems on which life depends are becoming less stable.

This is the challenge at the heart of hybrid intelligence. Natural and artificial intelligences bring different strengths to the task of understanding the world. Humans contribute embodied experience, relationships, values, judgment, and responsibility; AI contributes speed, scale, computational synthesis, and the ability to reveal patterns beyond ordinary perception. Their complementarity can enlarge what we collectively know and personally do. But the quality of this relationship depends on whether people retain the capacity and volition to direct it. Technological power can grow while the agency required to use it wisely diminishes.

The planet as teacher

The proposal for natural general intelligence offers a useful way to rethink this relationship. Its starting point is that the Earth is a vast, interconnected system whose dynamics cannot be learned from human-generated text alone. A nature model would draw directly on observations of oceans, atmosphere, ice, land, and living ecosystems; use them to anticipate possible consequences; and learn again from the Earth’s response.........

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