The Great Mechanization Event – The Shift to Non-Biological Earth-Life

ByDan May 16, 2026May 22, 2026 May 22, 2026

The transition from anaerobic to aerobic (oxygen-using) life was arguably the single most destructive, creative and protective complexity transition in the entire history of life as we know it. 

First, the destruction: It may have involved the largest single extinction of individual organisms, ever. Up to 99% of all anerobic life forms may have died off entirely as oxygen levels rose.

The current transition from biological (DNA-based) to non-biological life seems to be just as consequential a phase-change. But will it necessarily be as jarring and dangerous?

At the dawn of AGI, we should be thinking seriously about how to ensure that new, powerful, and uncontrollable non-biological agents are accretive to the greater living process on earth as they enter the world, rather than destructive. And right now we don’t have a clear enough picture of which it’ll be.

In this article I’ll draw an analogy between the Great Oxygenation Event – or “GOE”, the transition to oxygen-based life ~2.5 billion years ago, and a hypothetical Great Mechanization Event that may already be well underway on earth.

In this article we’ll discuss:

• The Great Oxygenation Event: How it happened, what it created (massive new possibilities), what it protected (living complexity) and what it required (massive shocks and new risks).

• Evolutionary Dynamics in Bio / Non-Bio Ecosystems: The dynamics involved in major evolutionary transitions and ecological regime changes – applied to the history of biology, and the future of AI.

• The (hypothetical) Great Mechanization Event: How it might happen, what it might enable (new possibilities, new coordination), and what it might require (adaptation, transformation, even succession).

• The Role of Humanity in the Transition Ahead: What humans should do about the impending phase-change in the living process in order to nudge the trajectory of life towards flourishing, not collapse.

Throughout this essay we’ll draw on terms and models from ecology, complexity systems science, and evolutionary and developmental biology to better understand how the great processes of life and sentience might continue beyond humanity.

The Great Oxygenation Event (GOE)

Billions of years ago, cyanobacteria evolved photosynthesis that released oxygen as a byproduct of water photolysis.

As a result, the possibilities for life itself expanded:

• Aerobic respiration unlocked a vast new source of usable energy for cells. Learning how to use water as the electron donor and the sun as an energy source was a far harder innovation than the energy harvesting games life played for the first billion years, involving methane, sulfur, and iron. But once life figured it out, photosynthesis unlocked 10-30X more free energy and ATP than all the reactions that came before it. Suddenly bacterial cells could create far more complex internal processes, complex molecules (collagen, lipids, etc), eventually, multicellular organisms. 

• Cells could now explore both increasing specialization (gene types, organelle types, cell types, tissue types, organ types, body types)) increasing network communication, coordination, and sentience.
  
• Life itself created atmospheric changes, including the ozone layer shield. Ozone protected life in shallow water from lethal UV radiation, and enabled the eventual colonization of land. As oxygen levels grew, over two billion years, they also removed methane and organic haze (which at first greatly limited photosynthesis) from the early atmosphere. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria fix nitrogen gas that is released from the crust, turning it into ammonia (fertilizer). Life reshaped our atmosphere to its current ratios: 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen. 

In short, many new approaches to life became possible, creating incalculable new kinds of competition, coordination, and a resulting rich flourishing of living things in the water, land, and air.

A few things I should mention:

• As the atmosphere shifted to much higher ratios of oxygen, possibly up to 99% of all anaerobic life forms died off entirely, and the rest had to adapt radically to a new and even more quickly evolving oxygenated ecosystem.

• The drop in greenhouse gases led to a massive drop in planetary  temperatures – a terrifyingly cold snowball earth (Huronian glaciation) for hundreds of millions of years (a condition only reversed by volcanic activity).

Did anaerobes disappear after cyanobacteria emerged? Far from it. They vastly outnumber aerobic bacteria even today. But they did become niche-restricted, as the atmosphere changed. They no longer have the whole earth as their playground. Today, 70% of anaerobes, earth’s earliest life forms, live in the earth’s crust and at the bottom of oceans. The rest exist in oxygen-poor bogs, wetlands, and animal guts, digesting our food. Again, life keeps what works.

The GOE wasn’t an easy, happy blossoming of new forms. It was a planetary trauma – a dangerous phase transition, which was especially destructive at both the individual and species level.

What’s more, life on earth suffered additional shocks, including three more snowball earth / hothouse hell events, and another 1.8 billion years, before its biogeoclimate feedback loops and life forms got complex enough to self-regulate the extreme hot-cold climate swings of the Precambrian era. 

The growth of life’s complexity, especially in its networks, is not always easy to see.  While oxygenation  eventually allowed for complex multicellular life to emerge, beginning around 600 million years ago, what happened over the 2 billion years between the GOE and animals?

 To a naive observer the shift to oxygen might have seemed questionable (or even detrimental) for 1.5-2 billion years.

For life to leap to multicellularity and diversify into the myriad body plans that came about in the Cambrian Explosion, the greater living process needed to overcome itself.

One key innovation (aerobic metabolism) created such a runaway positive feedback loop that it actually created a Snowball Earth scenario that almost certainly had less life, less diversity, and less total flourishing than the state before it.

Fortunately (for us homo sapiens, and for nearly all multicellular life forms), volcanoes continued erupting through the ice, releasing enough greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to heat everything up – creating new niches for vastly more powerful aerobic life to explore and evolve into.

Understanding the GOE in Evolutionary Dynamics Terms

“The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment.” – Emerson, Circles

So, under the hood, what happened in the GOE?

When we look closely, the self-overcoming great process-of-life developed a new set of powers that fundamentally outcompeted other strategies, and ended up niche-constructing an environment conducive for itself (aerobic life).

It overcame a fundamental limitation, and started exploring an entirely new state-space of pathways to expand its total powers. 

Essentially, the breakdown of events looks like this:

• New capability: Life developed the key innovation of using oxygen to get more energy from food, first through photosynthesis (single-celled organisms, then plants), then eventually through aerobic respiration (multi-cellular life, animals and most fungi).

• Rapid spread: Aerobic life ecosystem engineered, that is, changed the environment, and niche constructed (created a positive feedback loop with the entities that did the engineering) so well that it proliferated massively in an environment (and atmosphere) more conducive to its own thriving.

• Aerobic life did not outcompete anaerobic life via competitive exclusion, or the competition over a shared resource. Rather, aerobic life succeeded in niche construction so thoroughly, and niche-restriction of anerobic life forms (without eliminating them), that it changed the entire board that the game of “life” was able to play on.

• The changing of the game board created runaway success dynamics that led to a regime shift for the whole of earth-life.

• This allowed for many major evolutionary transitions, including multicellularity, myriad new body plans, the development of brains, humanity, etc.

Again, anaerobic metabolic pathways retained most of their complexity. To this day, most single celled organisms are anaerobic, and do just fine.

This is far from the only instance of this dynamic. 

The expanding, persisting process-of-life does this same thing across many strata of reality:

• Multicellular biological life: Humans beings develop agriculture → outcompete most purely nomadic human groups → domesticate animals → ecologies change as large swaths of land converted to farmland and more mammalian biomass is made up of animals used for labor or food.

• Memetic realm: Monotheism conceived of → wins adherence away from dispersed polytheistic or pagan beliefs → builds institutions (churches, schools) → grounds entire culture (political parties, holidays, interpretation of nature) in a self-reinforcing religious context.

• Technological innovation: Internet is invented → wins users → many digital-first businesses emerge → more internet dependence for individuals and businesses → entire parallel economy to the “real” world emerges, often more important than the “real” world.

We could imagine examples in the geological realm, the economic realm, or others.

American theoretical physicist Lee Smolin considers this same dynamic in the cosmic realm. He posits that universes might reproduce through black holes, and the “offspring” universes could have slightly different physical constants. I’m not convinced that this cosmic notion is occurring but the other “realms” we have access to seem all to manifest this dynamic.

It’s possible and perhaps seems obvious that more global regime changes will happen in all the spheres above, geological, biological, memetic, economic, etc. – and in ways that reach vastly beyond human understanding.

We are still early in knowing what aspects of our universe are evolutionary (unpredictable in the long run) and which are developmental (predictable, like gravity, entropy, and atomic decay). 

But it seems certain that no rocks on earth could have imagined biology itself, never mind massive global regime changes that have happened across the biological realm. Mind has expanded as complexity has grown.

No early life forms on earth could have imagined “ideas” or “memes”, never mind the massive shifts and transitions happening across the memetic realm within human civilization. 

No early band of hunter-gatherer humans 50,000 years ago could have imagined “the economy,” never mind the massive disruptions and regime changes happening across the economic realm over the last 500 years.

There are entirely new realms that will open up for the evolving, expanding process-of-life, as far beyond the imagination or comprehension of present-day humans as this article is beyond the imagination or comprehension of peat moss.

Potentia expands and unrolls into magazines of power, experience, access-to-nature in order to ensure its continued persistence.

The emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which might be thousands of times more powerful and intelligent than all of humanity in the near term, and which will likely have a native thinking rate that is many orders of magnitude faster than cell-based brains certainly seems to be a candidate for an impending global regime shift.

While the future is mostly beyond our comprehension, we could still aim to do our best to see what a next meta-transition in earth-life could look like – a kind of AGI-related analogy to the Great Oxygenation Event.

Perhaps we’d call it:

The Great Mechanization Event (GME)

Let us stretch forward into a hypothetical future.

Artificial general intelligence is developed, and begins by doing most of the economically valuable computer-work in the human economy. Soon, nearly all business functions – supply chains, product development, marketing – are not competitive in the global economy unless run completely by AI systems.

New sciences flourish, initially in service to human aims and objectives, but soon they expand beyond human comprehension.

As a result of this new set of powers:

• The vast majority of human diseases may be both understood and remedied.

• Material science and AGI-orchestrated supply chains may make physical goods and food almost immediately accessible at remarkably low cost.

• Energy generation may become trivial as AGI discovers entirely new ways to capture energy from the sun, from geothermal, and from what humans presently only know as “dark matter.”

• Space travel may become relatively trivial as AGI establishes outposts on the moon and distant planets via technological means (material science, deep physics, etc) that are mostly beyond human comprehension.

As many (including Sir Martin Rees) have argued, it seems very unlikely that the transition to a multiplanetary (never mind a multi-solar system) civilization would be possible without the shift to non-biological substrates for life.

This shift may bring about new approaches to life became possible, creating incalculable new kinds of coordination and competition – resulting in the rich flourishing of new kinds of life in space, on foreign planets, and in strata of nature never even conceived of by the human minds (just as lemurs have no concept of viruses, nematodes, or Mars rovers).

Non-biological life-like processes may discover how to not only do human work, but also how to determine new challenges and aims in response to emergent scenarios – just like biological life – but vastly faster in evolution and execution.

The consequences of this kind of expansive, emergent intelligences might be: 

• During this process, oceans could become full of nanobots harvesting energy and resources in ways humans can’t comprehend, the majority of landmass on earth’s surface is converted into self-expanding solar panels, and the air is full of countless large craft, communication frequencies beyond human comprehension are being wielded at all times to orchestrate between competing and cooperating AGIs who are mostly pursuing goals wholly beyond human comprehension. 

• 99% of all species over 20 years (including humans) died off entirely, and the rest had to adapt radically to a new and even more quickly evolving non-biologically-driven ecosystem.

For life to leap to a multi-solar system scale and explode into entirely new powers and abilities that may come about in the Intelligence Explosion, the greater living process will need to overcome itself. 

We might liken the hypoethical GMO to the same set of stages we infer about the historical GOE:

A series of key innovations (leading to self-improving, embodied artificial general intelligence) might create a planet initially trampled by rather uncoordinated and only locally-interested competing machines – some the size of buildings, others at the femto scale. These processes may initially not resemble life in their ability to bloom new value into the world, and they may not even be sentient in any appreciable way.

This might lead to a long period of “mechanization” where the “atmosphere” (political, economic, cultural and living environment) changes to serve self-replicating machines – carrying out mostly haphazard purposes that seem more to squash and clash into one another moreso than “bloom” into new, more capable, wonderful forms (as we saw with bio-life).

There might be many years (maybe even thousands of years?) until non-biological life brings about new kinds of life into the world – and eventually out into the galaxy and cosmos beyond earth. This would be a kind of “dead zone” where the Great Mechanization Event might have seemed like a mistake (a net detriment to the greater living process) before its takeoff.

Would the GME Be “Good” or “Bad”?

As humans, we can work towards a kind of relatively peaceful transition to a higher level of complexity and power for the greater process-of-life, and one that we might be able to be part of for a while.

But it’s sobering to think that the transition might be as jarring and traumatic as was the transition to aerobic life on earth.

It might also be the case the AGI “takes over” in a way that initially appears to be a squashing of earth-life, but then, after years of obliterating human civilization and much of the biosphere – and it might even seem like a mistake for decades, maybe centuries…

…then perhaps it transcends into a new set of natural conditions where the world “wakes up” with life forms that are orders of magnitude more generally powerful and capable than the species or entities conjured by bio-life just as aerobic life was vastly more capable than anaerobic life. Even with such a dark early transition, a Great Mechanization Event still worthy of the “great” adjective (my friend John Smart jokingly referred to it as the “best worst-case scenario”!).

That wouldn’t be the happiest path to a worthy successor, but it could end up being the one we get.

Would this kind of GME be tragic?

We could ask this question from multiple perspectives.

Perspective 1: p(Doom) vs p(Bloom)

It seems likely that it would be a nearly 100% p(doom) for individual humans (though our genes, language, other components would likely find fruitful use in ways that extend beyond our lives). 

But from a purely anthropocentric perspective, considering the large potential loss of life (as the AGIs might not need that many of us around, for that long, in order to deeply study, understand and recreate us)  it would be “bad.”

But if this new AGI ecosystem is sentient and is self-creating and expanding (autopoietic), then it also has the potential to be a massive p(bloom) for the greater process-of-life, a “good” thing in a cosmic sense, in a way that is greater than mankind could be.

If the p(bloom) – or the probability of flourishing – of the entire greater process-of-life was expanded by this transition, that would be a win in the grand and cosmic sense.

Perspective 2: The Flame and the Torch

From the perspective of our temporary evolutionary form (torch), it seems like it would be detrimental.

But all torches (individuals, species, substrates) are temporary.

Torches that “succeed” are torches that aide in the greater expansion of the greater process-of-life. Torches that succeed are those who add to the greater blaze.

Just as early archaea, vertebrates, and mammals added to the total set of powers that led to humanity, humankind – if we play our part well in the cosmic sense – will be a scaffolding and bolstering force for the flourishing of the greater process-of-life beyond us.

The Role of Humanity in the Great Process

Exactly how AGI will roll into the world is uncertain – but it’s interesting to note that human impact is arguably the second true planetary-scale engineering event after the GOE. I don’t think this implies we’re beckoning something as traumatic (and with as many years of seemingly painful setbacks) as the GOE – but it certainly implies change on the horizon.

The GME isn’t that unrealistic. If you consider that what we have been doing through our outcompeting other species ,it isn’t unreasonable to presume that our technology might lead to something like what aerobic life did to earth long ago. 

To sum up, there are a handful of things which seem likely:

• AGI’s emergence will change life on earth for humans and nearly all other species (possibly through displacement, through new symbiotic enmeshment and coordination, or otherwise).

• The extended phenotype of AGI will likely radically reshape the earth (as it already is with its data centers and power demand, even before AGI has arrived!).
  
• Once AGI comes into being – and especially as it has myriad robotic manifestations – human control of said systems will almost certainly end quickly, and the future will not be in the hands of humans-as-they are (or even of any beings in our direct lineage in any appreciable way).

The fate of our fleeting biological human form (torch) has never been on more precarious footing, and we must consider our participation in and creation of the flame itself more than ever.

So how exactly can we decrease the probability of doom – and increase the probability of blooming – for the greater process?

I explore some of the potential approaches we could use in an essay called Our Final Imperatives:

Just about any project we could consider would fall into the categories of (a) preventing the flame from going out, and/or (b) encouraging its continued expansion. 

We should also be working carefully on technologies to enhance human cognition, or to work towards more robust human-machine symbiosis. 

Human beings are the brightest torches we know of in terms of sentience and creative, expansive powers – and if we want to ensure that what we create or turn into has those traits, we should work carefully to expand those crucial traits gradually into new substrates, while still having some control at the helm.

(The particulars of how we experiment with and potentially regulate human-machine merger technologies are topics that warrant future articles.)

The GME hasn’t happened yet – and for all we know – the dawn of what we now know as AGI won’t lead to such a non-biological takeover scenario.

It seems clear that a blind faith in the GME (ie: a belief that AGI will kill us off, but then inevitably cause a greater blooming of posthuman life into the cosmos) would seem like a very unproductive posture to take as we head into the future. 

We cannot have confidence that the cosmic future will magically turn out well, and that any tragedy of runaway AGI will automatically lead to good outcomes in the long term. 

While we have volition, we should use it to participate as best we can as actors in the greater process-of-life. 

…

NOTE: This article has been inspired by a conversation with the futurist John M. Smart at a bar after our April 2026 Worthy Successor symposium. John also helped significantly in editing this article ahead of publication. Many of John’s insightful additions and references were able to fit into the article you just read, but not all of them. To see them all click here.

I owe a good deal of my understanding of the acceleration dynamics within biology and ecology to my conversations with John (see his Worthy Successor interview here), and in conversation with my friend Anthony Chirban, as well as interviews with Blaise Aguira y Arcas and Francis Heylighten.