Recursive Niche Construction

Bratton's mechanism for the Noocene, borrowed from evolutionary biology and made runaway. A lifeform alters its niche to capture more energy, matter and information; the altered niche imposes new selection pressures; the species then adapts to demands it indirectly created, so it "artificializes itself by artificializing its world and vice versa." The cycle, not the species, is the agent: humans are the medium through which complex intelligence terraformed Earth, "the vehicle of the Noocene but not its master." The open fork is what happens when the cycle artificializes intelligence itself (AI): an "advanced Noocene, or something else." Cousin of Likavčan's "assisted evolution" and WII's symbiogenetic major transitions.