All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

" I like to think

       (it has to be!)

of a cybernetic ecology

where we are free of our labors

and joined back to nature,

returned to our mammal

brothers and sisters,

and all watched over

by machines of loving grace"

(Richard Brautigan).

Our machines are terrible: great, hulking ,wasteful things. We treat materials as continua, unable to exploit the wondrous functionality at molecular scale.

Unlike life. Those few pounds of nanoscale sludge between your ears can't be replicated by hangars of supercomputers burning through the output of power stations.

But we will get there. Some people bemoan 'the holocene extinction', the eradication of species as we engineer the planet for human purposes. Yet this is just an interregnum. Soon will come the new anthropocene explosion: endless new species, bioengineered to created a benevolent ecology, where we are watched over by animals and plants of loving grace.*
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* No doubt they will be engineered to want to serve us: what could possibly go wrong ... ?