PERSON
E. O. Wilson
The American naturalist who proved emergence by studying ants for sixty years, who paid a heavy price for insisting that human nature is real and biological, and who left us, in a single sentence about Paleolithic emotions and godlike technology, the most accurate description of the predicament that artificial intelligence has made urgent.
Edward Osborne Wilson (1929–2021) was the naturalist of emergence. Born in Alabama, partially blinded at seven by a fishing accident, he turned his one sharp eye downward—to the ground, to the insects, to the colonies that built cities and waged wars without any individual understanding the colony's purpose. From this patient, unglamorous observation he extracted the central question of our age: how does something that looks like intelligence arise from parts that possess none? The
superorganism,
biophilia,
consilience, and his devastating diagnosis of
Paleolithic emotions encountering godlike technology—four concepts that together constitute the most rigorous biological framework for understanding what AI is and what it is doing to the species that built it. He was sometimes spectacularly wrong, publicly punished for being right, and honest about both. He died in December 2021, weeks before the chatbots arrived, having spent