The rise of technologies and the relatively free movement of people and goods have paved the way for a globalized world. All individuals and organizations are more connected globally than ever; this quality gave rise to emergence. Emergent properties of a system appear when the property that arose is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, the Russia-Ukraine war sent shock waves across the globe; food insecurity, energy insecurity, immigration crisis, cost of living crisis. Seemingly unrelated crises are thus linked together. This is why Hagens developed this idea of the Earth acting as a superorganism. This idea is developed by applying systems theory to Gaia. In 1978, James Miller wrote his seminal work ‘Living Systems’ discussing the similar qualities presented by various systems. He categorized his theory into cell, organ, organism, group, organization, community, society, and supranational system. He also expanded this idea into planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe; all interacting parts of a greater system. By looking at the movement of energy, matter, and information, he delineated 20 critical subsystems that every system (whether social, ecological, biological, or physical) possesses. Applying this theory to Earth as a superorganism, I have listed examples and briefly explained the critical sub-systems below:
Subsystems that Process Both Matter/Energy and Information
• Reproducer: Carries out sexual or asexual reproduction to create new systems. (Coral spawning, New firms incorporating, New nations forming, Space colonization)
• Boundary: Holds the system together and controls what enters and exits. (Earth’s atmosphere, National tariffs/customs, Citizenship laws, The magnetosphere and the upper atmosphere)
Subsystems that Process Matter and Energy
• Ingestor: Brings matter and energy from the environment across the boundary (Photosynthesis, Importing raw materials, Immigration, Meteors, cosmic dust, and solar radiation)
• Distributor: Moves matter and energy throughout the system. (Ocean currents, Global shipping networks, Transportation infrastructure)
• Converter: Changes inputs into forms usable by the system. Global Photosynthesis (sunlight>glucose), Refineries (oil>fuel), Education (potential>skills)
• Producer: Synthesizes matter and energy for growth, repair, or storage. (Phytoplankton biomass growth, Manufacturing sector, Construction industry)
• Matter-Energy Storage: Stores matter and energy for future use. (Seed banks, Strategic oil reserves, National grain reserves, Fossil fuel deposits and polar ice caps)
• Extruder: Expels wastes and products out of the system. (Respiration releasing CO2, Export of industrial waste, Prison/deportation systems, Earth radiating infrared heat back into space)
• Motor: Moves the system or its parts through the environment. (Animal migration, Global freight/shipping, Mass migration, Earth’s rotation and orbit moving it through the solar system)
• Supporter: Maintains the proper physical structure and spatial relationships. (Coral reefs, Banking system infrastructure, Government/legal institutions, The Sun’s gravity maintaining Earth’s stable orbital position)
Subsystems that Process Information
• Input Transducer: Brings information from the environment across the boundary. (Animal senses (predator detection), Market research, News media, Telescopes)
• Internal Transducer: Receives information about the internal state of the system. (Hormonal signaling, Inflation/unemployment reports, National census, Global GDP growth, Earth-observation satellites monitoring the planet’s climate and geology)
• Channel and Net: Routes information to various parts of the system. (Mycorrhizal fungal networks, SWIFT payment network, Internet/telecom, Satellite communication and deep space networks routing information)
• Timer: Signals time-based patterns and sequences for the system. (Circadian rhythms, Fiscal quarters, Election cycles, orbital period governing day-night and seasonal cycles)
• Decoder: Changes external information into a private, internal language. (Nervous system (sensory processing), Financial analysts, Journalists/translators, astronomical data)
• Associator: Links items of information together to form new knowledge. (Pollinator-plant coevolution, Credit-rating agencies, Academic research, astrophysics)
• Memory: Stores information over time for later retrieval. (DNA, World Bank economic archives, Libraries/archives, ice cores and geological strata recording Earth’s cosmic and climatic history)
• Decider: Makes executive choices and controls the system’s actions. (Natural selection, Central banks (interest rates), UN Security Council, Space agencies (NASA, ESA))
• Encoder: Translates internal information back into a public language. (Bird calls/pheromones, Corporate PR/earnings calls, Government spokespeople, The Voyager Golden Record encoding Earth’s information for cosmic transmission)
• Output Transducer: Sends information out across the boundary to the environment. (Seed dispersal, Export industries, Diplomacy/cultural exports, Radio antennas transmitting signals into space)
The superorganism is then systems interacting with suprasystems and subsystems with dynamic complexity. It spans across the fields of ecology, sociology, economics, astronomy, and politics to understand the whole of Earth as a single operating unit.
As we introduce Artificial Intelligence as a potential general-purpose technology to this superorganism, what may we expect? AI being ubiquitous in the next few decades is not a flight of fancy. If we take Miller’s subsystems seriously as the functional anatomy of any living system, then AI’s entrance into the planetary superorganism is not merely the arrival of a new tool, but rather it is the emergence of a new organ, one that inserts itself primarily into the information-processing subsystems. The very subsystems responsible for how the superorganism perceives, decides, and acts. This is precisely why AI’s impact cannot be understood through a single lens.
AI as Threat
AI’s most consequential risk is that it doesn’t merely add a subsystem but threatens to colonize existing ones, distorting the functions they were evolved or designed to perform. Consider the Decider subsystem. At the human scale, this has historically been distributed across central banks, parliaments, courts, and individual human judgment. As AI systems increasingly inform decisions once reserved for human deciders, we risk a quiet transfer of executive control to a subsystem with no accountability structure, no capacity for moral reasoning, and no stake in the consequences it produces. A superorganism whose Decider function has been captured by opaque, misaligned optimization targets is a superorganism at risk of acting against its own survival. It is the biological equivalent of a tumor hijacking the signaling pathways of a healthy organ.
The Channel and Net and Encoder/Decoder subsystems face a parallel threat. Social media algorithms, now increasingly AI-curated, control what information flows between the billions of nodes (humans) in the societal system. When this channel is optimized not for the coherence or survival of the whole system but for engagement and profit, we get emergent pathology that has unintended consequences. Misinformation, synthetic media, and deepfakes represent a corruption of the Encoder function itself: the capacity to translate internal states into public language becomes untethered from any internal state at all. AI can encode messages from nothing, flooding the Channel and Net with signal that has no true source.
Perhaps most existentially, AI threatens the Boundary subsystem; the boundary responsible for maintaining identity and integrity. As AI erodes the distinction between human-generated and machine-generated content, between authentic and synthetic experience, the boundary between “self” and “environment,” so crucial to any living system’s survival, begins to blur. At the individual psychological level, the institutional level, and now, potentially, at the level of the planetary superorganism’s own self-model, this will have cascading effects.
AI as Tool
Yet the very subsystems AI threatens to distort, it can also radically strengthen. This is the fundamental ambivalence of any general-purpose technology.
As an Input Transducer, AI-augmented sensor networks, satellite imagery analysis, and climate modelling give the superorganism unprecedented sensory resolution. We can now detect deforestation, ocean temperature anomalies, and disease outbreaks in near real-time, effectively expanding Earth’s capacity to perceive its own condition, not unlike a nervous system gaining new receptors.
As Associator and Memory, AI’s capacity to find patterns across vast datasets (protein folding and climate feedback loops) allows the superorganism to link information in ways no individual human mind, or even collective human institution, could manage unaided. AlphaFold’s contribution to AI-assisted drug discovery is, in Miller’s terms, an enhancement of the Associator function at a civilizational scale.
As Distributor, AI-optimized logistics and supply chain management move matter and energy with far greater efficiency, reducing waste in a system whose Extruder function (its capacity to expel waste sustainably) is already dangerously overloaded, as evidenced by the very crises of food and energy insecurity.
Used consciously, AI could become the superorganism’s most powerful Internal Transducer. It can become a genuine planetary nervous system capable of sensing its own condition (via climate dashboards, global health surveillance, real-time economic indicators) with a coherence and speed no prior civilization may have possessed. Hagens’ framing of Earth as a superorganism becomes far more than metaphor if AI genuinely functions as the connective tissue linking planetary sensing to planetary response.
AI as Mirror
Perhaps AI’s most underappreciated role is as a mirror. This is not because it reflects the world back to us, but because it reflects us, and by extension, the superorganism’s own internal contradictions, back to itself.
Large language models are trained on the sum total of digitized human expression: our knowledge, but also our biases, our unresolved conflicts, our unmetabolized traumas. In this sense, AI functions as a kind of collective Decoder turned inward: it doesn’t just decode external signals for the system; it decodes the system’s own accumulated, half-conscious content and hands it back in coherent, articulate form. When an AI model reproduces racial bias, political polarization, or engagement-optimized content, it is accurately encoding patterns already present in the human noosphere it was built from. This is precisely the kind of “mirror” dynamic Dr. Hedlund gestures toward in his own thesis while discussing the epistemic crisis as a crisis of worldview fragmentation. AI doesn’t cause this fragmentation so much as it makes it newly, uncomfortably visible, reflecting back the incoherence of a superorganism whose Decider and Associator subsystems have not yet learned to integrate across its many competing worldviews.
Understood this way, the emergence of AI within Earth’s superorganism forces a question: is the planetary system’s crisis fundamentally one of matter and energy (resource scarcity, ecological degradation), or is it, at a deeper level, an information crisis — a failure of the Decider, Associator, and Channel and Net subsystems to process an increasingly interconnected reality coherently? If the latter, then AI is neither simply humanity’s salvation nor its doom. It is at best the amplifier of whichever tendency, integrative or disintegrative, currently dominates the superorganism’s own psyche. The mirror does not choose what it shows us. It is we who choose.