Self, Ego, and the Absence of Clear Definitions in Western Buddhism

 

This is today's Daily Dharma quote from Tricycle.

"Our fundamental problems are our ignorance and ego-grasping. We grasp at our identity as being our personality, memories, opinions, judgments, hopes, fears, chattering away—all revolving around this me me me me. This creates the idea of an unchanging permanent self at the center of our being, which we have to satisfy and protect. This is an illusion." — Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, “No Excuses”

Here is another wonderful Buddhist teacher, and this one a Westerner, who confuses ego and self.

The last piece of her quote is exactly right, grasping or attachment "creates the idea of an unchanging permanent self at the center of our being, which we have to satisfy and protect. This is an illusion." But the initial comment on "ego-grasping" misunderstands ego and - I'm willing to suggest - represents issues in translation of the original texts into English by people who do not understand the distinctions between ego and self.

Let's start with the self.

"Nobody ever was or had a self"

The self is an illusion, as Bruce Hood so eloquently described in his 2002 book, The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity. Here is a quote from his interview with Sam Harris in 2012:

For most of us, the sense of our self is as an integrated individual inhabiting a body. I think it is helpful to distinguish between the two ways of thinking about the self that William James talked about. There is conscious awareness of the present moment that he called the “I,” but there is also a self that reflects upon who we are in terms of our history, our current activities and our future plans. James called this aspect of the self, “me” which most of us would recognize as our personal identity—who we think we are. However, I think that both the “I” and the “me” are actually ever-changing narratives generated by our brain to provide a coherent framework to organize the output of all the factors that contribute to our thoughts and behaviors. 

In Integral Psychology (Wilber, 2000), the experience of an "I" is known as the proximate self (the self from which we view the world) and the "me" is known as the distal self (the self upon which the proximate self reflects).

Here is another quote from Hood in that interview:

I do not think there are many cognitive scientists who would doubt that the experience of I is constructed from a multitude of unconscious mechanisms and processes. Me is similarly constructed, though we may be more aware of the events that have shaped it over our lifetime. But neither is cast in stone and both are open to all manner of reinterpretation. As artists, illusionists, movie makers, and more recently experimental psychologists have repeatedly shown, conscious experience is highly manipulatable and context dependent. Our memories are also largely abstracted reinterpretations of events – we all hold distorted memories of past experiences.

What Hood is discussing is the lack of a concrete, unitary self. Self is more accurately understood as a process, not as a static "thing." This is the fundamental error of Buddhist psychology as interpreted in the West.

Before moving on to the ego, here is Thomas Metzinger (Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, 2003) on the self:

[My] main thesis is that no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process—and the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self-model.

Again, Metzinger's concept of a self-model is roughly the same as the proximate self, the constantly changing and illusory "I" of consciousness.

In more contemporary conceptions, self is seen as a process, as on-going experiencing and narrative of thoughts, feelings, senses, and so on. There is an absence of evaluation, but attention is focused on the content, observing thoughts and feelings and watching them come and go.

Stephen Hayes' Acceptance and Commitment Therapy model (1999/2011) recognizes three types of self: "the conceptualized self, ongoing self-awareness, and self as perspective." Each of these has its role, but one of them keeps as trapped in ideas and perceptions that are usually outdated and/or distorted.

 

People tell stories, narrate life histories, define their best attributes, evaluated themselves, compare their attributes to those of others, create cause and effect theories between their narrative memories and their experiences (and reflected) attributes. This is the conceptualized self (the distal self), and it can frequently be our own personally constructed prison. From Hayes:

Often consistency can be maintained more easily simply by distorting or reinterpreting events if they are inconsistent with our conceptualized self. If a person believes him- or herself to be kind, for example, there is less room to deal directly and openly with instances of behavior that could more readily be called cruel. In this way, a conceptualized self becomes resistant to change and variation and fosters self-deception.

Hayes also points out that many modern therapies (especially cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, and dialectical behavioral therapy, DBT) focus almost exclusively on this conceptualized self, identifying healthy emotion from destructive emotions, rational thoughts from irrational, self-affirming beliefs from self-negating beliefs, and so on. This is what most of us are doing to ourselves already.

Ongoing self-awareness encourages people to see what they see (in their minds or their experience) as they see it, without objectifying, concretizing, or justifying what was felt or seen. If we do not objectify experience, we cease to need lies or self-deception to feel okay. When the specific content of our ongoing self-awareness becomes less of an issue, a "fluid and useful self-knowledge is more likely to be fostered" (Hayes, 1999).  

This aspect of self leads inherently to psychological flexibility because on-going experience is ever-changing, always creating itself anew with each passing moment.

Self as perspective, or self as context, can also be thought of as the observing self. The the observing self is a core capacity often equated with the higher self, the soul, the Atman, Buddhanature, or Christ Consciousness. For a more psychoanalytic variation, see Arthur Deikman's The Observing Self (1983). Hayes argues that "a sense of self as locus or context cannot change once it emerges, because it is so basic and fundamental." As organisms, all of us have a locus, context, or perspective, and at the same time, "awareness of an experiential locus feels transcendent." He places the spirit/matter duality in this "paradox" (his word).

When self is contextualized and process-focused, we are as close as we will get to being in the present moment, which can be equated with 2 of the four types of samadhi identified by the Buddha:

• A pleasant abiding in this current life — achieved through concentrative development of the four jhānas
• Mindfulness and clear comprehension — achieved through concentrative mindfulness of the rise and fall of feelings, perceptions and thoughts.[3]

Few of us live in this state for very long, if at all.

Even if we could live in this state, it would not be conducive to paying bills, going to work, building something, writing a blog post, or much of anything else that requires we interact intentionally with the world, including awareness of past and future events.

Certainly, the more time we spend in that state, the less attached we become to our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs - we realize they are as transient as clouds in the sky. But we need Metzinger's self-model to negotiate daily life.

To be clear, none of what we have described thus far is the ego, at least not in the model of the mind I am presenting here.

[NOTE: this all might be just my theory, although it is cobbled together from years of reading and practice.] 

And so what of ego?

Sigmund Freud coined the term ego as the psychological mechanism to mediate sexual and aggression drives and reconcile the tension between id-level drives and the internalized rules and mores of society (the super ego). From Wikipedia:

The ego is the organized part of the personality structure that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions. Conscious awareness resides in the ego, although not all of the operations of the ego are conscious. Originally, Freud used the word ego to mean a sense of self, but later revised it to mean a set of psychic functions such as judgment, tolerance, reality testing, control, planning, defense, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory.^[1] The ego separates out what is real. It helps us to organize our thoughts and make sense of them and the world around us.^[1]

Few professionals (aside form a handful of psychoanalytic originalists) still adhere to this model. The advent of ego psychology in the early to middle part of the last century began the redefinition process. Later proponents of ego psychology

emphasized the importance of early-childhood experiences and socio-cultural influences on ego development. René Spitz (1965), Margaret Mahler (1968), Edith Jacobson (1964), and Erik Erikson studied infant and child behavior and their observations were integrated into ego psychology. Their observational and empirical research described and explained early attachment issues, successful and faulty ego development, and psychological development through interpersonal interactions.

Ego psychology has since waned in influence and popularity.

More contemporary definitions conceptualize ego not as our sense of self-importance ("man, he sure has a large ego!"), but as our adaptation(s) to experience through which we navigate the world. In the Ego States: Theory and Therapy model of John and Helen Watkins (1997), we are not born with parts or ego states--they are learned through repetition over time.

Our ego states are formed when we do something over and over again. This 'over and over again' learning creates a physical neural pathway in the brain that has its own level of emotion, abilities, and experience of living. As stated by the Watkins in their book, "Another characteristic of an ego state is that it was probably developed to enhance the individual's ability to adapt and cope with a specific problem or situation" (Watkins & Watkins, p. 29, 1997).

Once these neural pathways become wired into the brain, they are ego states, and we can be overtaken by an ego state whenever a need for that particular state occurs, or when a memory or a trigger for a specific injury is activated, an ego state may come out in an attempt to gain some resolution (repetition of the trauma). Our experience of this may feel like we were hijacked by a whole different self, and to the extent that the wounding was longitudinal there is some truth to this. In the same way that Jung defined complexes as semi-autonomous parts of the self that have been split off, the same is true of ego states.

The most extreme form of this is called dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder). In this condition, the parts or ego states are so adapted and structurally embeded in the mind/brain that they are autonomous, at least until the person enters therapy.

Another way of understanding this process is that ego states develop out of an attachment to or avoidance of (which is still an attachment, but to its supposed opposite) a particular experiential state. For example, as an infant and toddler, whenever I am scared or in discomfort, I would cry, a baby's only means of getting its needs met. But my hypothetical mother would yell at me to stop crying, or even spank me when I cry for too long. After a few repetitions of this, I have learned not to display overt signs of fear or pain, and I no longer cry.

As I grow up, this message is repeated frequently - boys don't cry, only wusses cry. So on top of the fear of being punished (or more accurately, to an infant, annihilated) for crying or showing fear/pain, now such expressions of healthy human emotions are equated with being a girl, and as a little boy, being a girl is about the worst thing possible (obvious nonsense, but many boys are raised this way). So I learn an adaptation--whenever I am scared or in pain/fear, I hit myself on the chest with my fist once or twice to remind me not to show my feelings.

By the time I am 8-10 years old, I have learned how to stuff down those feelings so that I don't even consciously acknowledge them. However, when something that should scare me or cause me pain does happen, I feel certain I am going to be punished, and I am filled with shame. That is the ego state that arises. The shame is sourced in that earliest experience--mommy doesn't love me when I cry, so something must be wrong with me that some things make me cry. To feel ashamed is to believe that one is defective and worthless. We will go to any lengths not to feel that shame and, especially, not let anyone else know about it. It's not rational logic, it's relational logic.

From the perspective I just outlined, ego grasping is holding onto and defending our adaptive strategies that keep us stuck in an emotional and behavioral box--our ego states. These behaviors have at one time served us well, and kept us safe, but now they are no longer adaptive and may, in fact, be harmful. Yet we cling to these strategies until we learn something better. That's one layer of ego-grasping.

A second layer of ego grasping is identifying with and internalizing our conceptualized self. We often do this, in part, as a response to triggering of an ego state. When that shame state gets triggered, we cannot tolerate the feeling so we puff ourselves up and act as if we are self-confident and secure. This may be a distorted version of self we have created and concretized, but it is dishonest and does not serve us in alleviating or removing the shame.

This gets to the heart of ego grasping: When we are attached to ego states or to the conceptualized self (the me), we continue to live within the prison of samsara, which is the source of our suffering. As long as well allow those attachments, there is no way to unlock and release the negative feelings/emotions they conceal.

Definitions

I often find myself at odds with the Western Buddhist definitions of ego and self. Too often they are confused, conflated, and seen as unnecessary, something to be shed through dedicated practice.

I prefer my own model - although it is most certainly not mine in that it is based on the work of many other people from diverse fields.

After several hours working on this post, my main point is that there needs to be some form of agreement within the Buddhist and psychological words as to what these words mean. With so many teachers from so many disciplines using this terminology now, the lack of an agreed-upon glossary of terms is confusing at best, and sometimes just plain frustrating.

George Dvorsky - 20 Crucial Terms Every 21st Century Futurist Should Know

This list of terms that apparently every futurist should know comes from George Dvorsky of io9 and his own blog, Sentient Developments. I don't really consider myself a futurist in any real (hell, being a presentist is hard enough).

20 Crucial Terms Every 21st Century Futurist Should Know

George Dvorsky | April 19, 2014

 

We live in an era of accelerating change, when scientific and technological advancements are arriving rapidly. As a result, we are developing a new language to describe our civilization as it evolves. Here are 20 terms and concepts that you'll need to navigate our future.

Back in 2007 I put together a list of terms every self-respecting futurist should be familiar with. But now, some seven years later, it's time for an update. I reached out to several futurists, asking them which terms or phrases have emerged or gained relevance since that time. These forward-looking thinkers provided me with some fascinating and provocative suggestions — some familiar to me, others completely new, and some a refinement of earlier conceptions. Here are their submissions, including a few of my own.
  1. Co-veillance

 

Futurist and scifi novelist David Brin suggested this one. It's kind of a mash-up between Steve Mann's sousveillance and Jamais Cascio's Participatory Panopticon, and a furtherance of his own Transparent Society concept. Brin describes it as: "reciprocal vision and supervision, combining surveillance with aggressively effective sousveillance." He says it's "scrutiny from below." As Brin told io9:

Folks are rightfully worried about surveillance powers that expand every day. Cameras grow quicker, better, smaller, more numerous and mobile at a rate much faster than Moore's Law (i.e. Brin's corollary). Liberals foresee Big Brother arising from an oligarchy and faceless corporations, while conservatives fret that Orwellian masters will take over from academia and faceless bureaucrats. Which fear has some validity? All of the above. While millions take Orwell's warning seriously, the normal reflex is to whine: "Stoplooking at us!" It cannot work. But what if, instead of whining, we all looked back? Countering surveillance with aggressively effective sousveillance — or scrutiny from below? Say by having citizen-access cameras in the camera control rooms, letting us watch the watchers?

Brin says that reciprocal vision and supervision will be hard to enact and establish, but that it has one advantage over "don't look at us" laws, namely that it actually has a chance of working. (Image credit: 24Novembers/Shutterstock)

2. Multiplex Parenting

This particular meme — suggested to me by the Institute for the Future's Distinguished Fellow Jamais Cascio — has only recently hit the radar. "It's in-vitro fertilization," he says, "but with a germline-genetic mod twist." Recently sanctioned by the UK, this is the biotechnological advance where a baby can have three genetic parents via sperm, egg, and (separately) mitochondria. It's meant as a way to flush-out debilitating genetic diseases. But it could also be used for the practice of human trait selection, or so-called "designer babies". The procedure is currently being reviewed for use in the United States. The era of multiplex parents has all but arrived.

3. Technological Unemployment

Futurist and scifi novelist Ramez Naam says we should be aware of the potential for "technological unemployment." He describes it as unemployment created by the deployment of technology that can replace human labor. As he told io9,

For example, the potential unemployment of taxi drivers, truck drivers, and so on created by self-driving cars. The phenomenon is an old one, dating back for centuries, and spurred the original Luddite movement, as Ned Ludd is said to have destroyed knitting frames for fear that they would replace human weavers. Technological unemployment in the past has been clearly outpaced (in the long term) by the creation of new wealth from automation and the opening of new job niches for humans, higher in levels of abstraction. The question in the modern age is whether the higher-than-ever speed of such displacement of humans can be matched by the pace of humans developing new skills, and/or by changes in social systems to spread the wealth created.

Indeed, the potential for robotics and AI to replace workers of all stripes is significant, leading to worries of massive rates of unemployment and subsequent social upheaval. These concerns have given rise to another must-know term that could serve as a potential antidote: guaranteed minimum income. (Image credit: Ociacia/Shutterstock)

4. Substrate-Autonomous Person

In the future, people won't be confined to their meatspace bodies. This is what futurist and transhumanist Natasha Vita-More describes as the "Substrate-Autonomous Person." Eventually, she says, people will be able to form identities in numerous substrates, such as using a "platform diverse body" (a future body that is wearable/usable in the physical/material world — but also exists in computational environments and virtual systems) to route their identity across the biosphere, cybersphere, and virtual environments.

"This person would form identities," she told me.

"But they would consider their personhood, or sense of identity, to be associated with the environment rather than one exclusive body." Depending on the platform, the substrate-autonomous person would upload and download into a form or shape (body) that conforms to the environment. So, for a biospheric environment, the person would use a biological body, for the Metaverse, a person would use an avatar, and for virtual reality, the person would use a digital form.

5. Intelligence Explosion


 
It's time to retire the term 'Technological Singularity.' The reason, says the Future of Humanity Institute's Stuart Armstrong, is that it has accumulated far too much baggage, including quasi-religious connotations. It's not a good description of what might happen when artificial intelligence matches and then exceeds human capacities, he says. What's more, different people interpret it differently, and it only describes a limited aspect of much broader concept. In its place, Armstrong says we should use a term devised by the computer scientist I. J. Good back in 1967: the "Intelligence explosion." As Armstrong told io9,

It describes the apparent sudden increase in the intelligence of an artificial system such as an AI. There are several scenarios for this: it could be that the system radically self improves itself, finding that as it becomes more intelligent, it's easier for it to become more intelligent still. But it could also be that human intelligence clusters pretty close in mindspace, so a slowly improving AI could shoot rapidly across the distance that separates the village idiot from Einstein. Or it could just be that there are strong skill returns to intelligence, so that an entity need only be slightly more intelligent that humans to become vastly more powerful. In all cases, the fate of life on Earth is likely to be shaped mainly by such "super-intelligences".

Image credit: sakkmesterke/Shutterstock.

6. Longevity Dividend

While many futurists extol radical life extension on humanitarian grounds, few consider the astounding fiscal benefits that are to be had through the advent of anti-aging biotechnologies. The Longevity Dividend, as suggested to me by bioethicist James Hughes of the IEET, is the "assertion by biogerontologists that the savings to society of extending healthy life expectancy with therapies that slow the aging process would far exceed the cost of developing and providing them, or of providing additional years of old age assistance." Longer healthy life expectancy would reduce medical and nursing expenditures, argues Hughes, while allowing more seniors to remain independent and in the labor force. No doubt, the corporate race toprolong life is heating up in recognition of the tremendous amounts of money to be made — and saved — through preventative medicines.

7. Repressive Desublimation

This concept was suggested by our very own Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of io9 and author of Scatter, Adapt And Remember. The idea of repressive desublimation was first developed by by political philosopher Herbert Marcuse in his groundbreaking book Eros and Civilization. Newitz says:

It refers to the kind of soft authoritarianism preferred by wealthy, consumer culture societies that want to repress political dissent. In such societies, pop culture encourages people to desublimate or express their desires, whether those are for sex, drugs or violent video games. At the same time, they're discouraged from questioning corporate and government authorities. As a result, people feel as if they live in a free society even though they may be under constant surveillance and forced to work at mind-numbing jobs. Basically, consumerism and so-called liberal values distract people from social repression.

8. Intelligence Amplification


 
Sometimes referred to as IA, this is a specific subset of human enhancement — the augmentation of human intellectual capabilities via technology. "It is often positioned as either a complement to or a competitor to the creation of Artificial Intelligence," says Ramez Naam. "In reality there is no mutual exclusion between these technologies." Interestingly, Naam says IA could be a partial solution to the problem of technological unemployment — as a way for humans, or posthumans, to "keep up" with advancing AI and to stay in the loop.

9. Effective Altruism

This is another term suggested by Stuart Armstrong. He describes it as

the application of cost-effectiveness to charity and other altruistic pursuits. Just as some engineering approaches can be thousands of times more effective at solving problems than others, some charities are thousands of time more effective than others, and some altruistic career paths are thousands of times more effective than others. And increased efficiency translates into many more lives saved, many more people given better outcomes and opportunities throughout the world. It is argued that when charity can be made more effective in this way, it is a moral duty to do so: inefficiency is akin to letting people die.

10. Moral Enhancement

On a somewhat related note, James Hughes says moral enhancement is another must-know term for futurists of the 21st Century. Also known as virtue engineering, it's the use of drugs and wearable or implanted devices to enhance self-control, empathy, fairness, mindfulness, intelligence and spiritual experiences.

11. Proactionary Principle

This one comes via Max More, president and CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. It's an interesting and obverse take on the precautionary principle. "Our freedom to innovate technologically is highly valuable — even critical — to humanity," he told io9. "This implies several imperatives when restrictive measures are proposed: Assess risks and opportunities according to available science, not popular perception. Account for both the costs of the restrictions themselves, and those of opportunities foregone. Favor measures that are proportionate to the probability and magnitude of impacts, and that have a high expectation value. Protect people's freedom to experiment, innovate, and progress."

12. Mules

Jamais Cascio suggested this term, though he admits it's not widely used. Mules are unexpected events — a parallel to Black Swans — that aren't just outside of our knowledge, but outside of our understanding of how the world works. It's named after Asimov's Mule from the Foundation series.

13. Anthropocene 


Another must-know term submitted by Cascio, described as "the current geologic age, characterized by substantial alterations of ecosystems through human activity." (Image credit: NASA/NOAA).

14. Eroom's Law

Unlike Moore's Law, where things are speeding up, Eroom's Law describes — at least in the pharmaceutical industry — things that are slowing down (which is why it's Moore's Law spelled backwards). Ramez Naam says the rate of new drugs developed per dollar spent by the industry has dropped by roughly a factor of 100 over the last 60 years. "Many reasons are proposed for this, including over-regulation, the plucking of low-hanging fruit, diminishing returns of understanding more and more complex systems, and so on," he told io9.

15. Evolvability Risk

Natasha Vita-More describes this as the ability of a species to produce variants more apt or powerful than those currently existing within a species:

One way of looking at evolvability is to consider any system — a society or culture, for example, that has evolvable characteristics. Incidentally, it seems that today's culture is more emergent and mutable than physiological changes occurring in human biology. In the course of a few thousand years, human tools, language, and culture have evolved manifold. The use of tools within a culture has been shaped by the culture and shows observable evolvability-from stones to computers-while human physiology has remained nearly the same.

16. Artificial Wombs

"This is any device, whether biological or technological, that allows humans to reproduce without using a woman's uterus," says Annalee Newitz. Sometimes called a "uterine replicator," she says these devices would liberate women from the biological difficulties of pregnancy, and free the very act of reproduction from traditional male-female pairings. "Artificial wombs might develop alongside social structures that support families with more than two parents, as well as gay marriage," says Newitz.

17. Whole Brain Emulations
Whole brain emulations, says Stuart Armstrong, are human brains that have been copied into a computer, and that are then run according to the laws of physics, aiming to reproduce the behaviour of human minds within a digital form. As he told io9,

They are dependent on certain (mild) assumptions on how the brain works, and requires certain enabling technologies, such as scanning devices to make the original brain model, good understanding of biochemistry to run it properly, and sufficiently powerful computers to run it in the first place. There are plausible technology paths that could allow such emulations around 2070 or so, with some large uncertainties. If such emulations are developed, they would revolutionise health, society and economics. For instance, allowing people to survive in digital form, and creating the possibility of "copyable human capital": skilled, trained and effective workers that can be copied as needed to serve any business purpose.

Armstrong says this also raises great concern over wages, and over the eventual deletion of such copies.

18. Weak AI

Ramez Naam says this term has gone somewhat out of favor, but it's still a very important one. It refers to the vast majority of all 'artificial intelligence' work that produces useful pattern matching or information processing capabilities, but with no bearing on creating a self-aware sentient being. "Google Search, IBM's Watson, self-driving cars, autonomous drones, face recognition, some medical diagnostics, and algorithmic stock market traders are all examples of 'weak AI'," says Naam. "The large majority of all commercial and research work in AI, machine learning, and related fields is in 'weak AI'."

Naam argues that this trend — and the motivations for it — is one of the arguments for the Singularity being further than it appears.

19. Neural Coupling

Imagine the fantastic prospect of creating interfaces that connect the brains of two (or more) humans. Already today, scientists have created interfaces that allow humans to move the limb — or in this case, the tail — of another animal. At first, these technologies will be used for therapeutic purposes; they could be used to help people relearn how to use previously paralyzed limbs. More radically, it could eventually be used for recreational purposes. Humans could voluntarily couple themselves and move each other's body parts.

20. Computational Overhang

This refers to any situation in which new algorithms can suddenly and dramatically exploit existing computational power far more efficiently than before. This is likely to happen when tons of computational power remains untapped, and when previously used algorithms were suboptimal. This is an important concept as far as the development of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is concerned. As noted by Less Wrong, it

signifies a situation where it becomes possible to create AGIs that can be run using only a small fraction of the easily available hardware resources. This could lead to an intelligence explosion, or to a massive increase in the number of AGIs, as they could be easily copied to run on countless computers. This could make AGIs much more powerful than before, and present an existential risk.

Luke Muehlhauser from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) describes it this way:

Suppose that computing power continues to double according to Moore's law, but figuring out the algorithms for human-like general intelligence proves to be fiendishly difficult. When the software for general intelligence is finally realized, there could exist a 'computing overhang': tremendous amounts of cheap computing power available to run [AIs]. AIs could be copied across the hardware base, causing the AI population to quickly surpass the human population.

Top image via NEOGAF.
This article originally appeared at io9.