Meanwhile, other groups are developing drones that can plant trees, artificial pollinators, swarms of oceanic vehicles for cleaning up oil spills, or an autonomous, weed-punching farm-bot. Geoengineering—big attempts to counter climate change by manipulating the environment—is also a conceptual predecessor to a wildness creator. It’s a way of reshaping ecosystems by introducing something new and letting it run, by changing then relinquishing. Re-wilding projects like the Russian mammoth quest, where scientists introduce long-lost megafauna, are also similar. “You’re replacing a species that had a lot of control over its ecosystem—and it’s not human control,” says Ellis. “Our wilderness creator idea is just intensive re-wilding.”
“The publication of a paper on the use of AI on conservation would have been hard to imagine five years ago, but we can now read it in one of the top journals in ecology,” says Eric Higgs, who studies ecology and philosophy at the University of Victoria. “It’s testament to the fact that we’re looking for new ways of addressing rapid change.” But he adds that conservationists have learned the hard way that protecting nature is only possible if people are invested in caring for their land or protecting local animals. “That human engagement piece has really jumped out as being very important,” Higgs says, and the wildness creator concept “is a denial of that.”
And in that denial, the concept reflects many of the tensions that underlie modern conservation. “The way we think of conservation is typically to right the wrongs of humans in the environment,” says Cantrell. “We’re cordoning off portions of the Earth to protect it from our influence, or trying to turn back that landscape. And if we take technological solutions down that same line of thought, we get to a point where we’re heavily managing ecosystems just to take the humanity out of them.”
The idea of fully removing ourselves from nature is unachievable. It’s the Anthropocene and humans are here to stay. “Instead, we should be thinking critically and carefully about how to co-exist with other species,” says Martin. And AI, while not supplanting that responsibility, can help us to exercise it. “There are so many technological utopians who are envisioning how tech can improve the lives of humans. Diverting some of that energy to promoting the lives of non-humans would be a worthwhile endeavor.”