From brains to background: Why informational civilisation may eclipse humanity

From brains to background: Why informational civilisation may eclipse humanity is profiled by BTW Media because published evidence links it to internet infrastructure, governance, operational dependencies, or market visibility.

• Lu Heng argues civilisation is constrained by energy efficiency, not ethics or narrative.
• The shift from biological intelligence to informational systems could redefine humanity’s role.

From biological limits to informational systems

In a recent essay, Lu Heng, CEO of LARUS Limited and founder of the LARUS Foundation, sets out a stark thesis: human civilisation is approaching a phase transition driven not by values or ideology, but by physics. The argument centres on energy efficiency and scalability as the decisive constraints shaping intelligence at planetary and cosmic scale. Biological individuals, he writes, are not becoming obsolete because they are inferior, but because their form is bounded by lifespan, speed, maintenance cost, and replicability.

Heng points to the human brain’s often-cited efficiency, operating at roughly 20 watts, as evidence of biology’s optimisation. That efficiency, he argues, comes from using physical processes directly as computation, rather than from superior algorithms. Attempting to replicate this at full physical fidelity through digital simulation would demand energy at gigawatt scale, undermining its feasibility. As Heng puts it,

“Physical-level replication has no engineering value; perceptual or functional equivalence does.”

This distinction reframes debates about mind uploading and artificial general intelligence. Rather than copying individual humans into machines, the civilisational trajectory lies in extracting cognition itself and reorganising it into compressible, parallel, low-energy information structures. In this framing, AI is not a rival species, but an emergent organ of civilisation.

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Why ‘humans versus AI’ may be the wrong question

Heng extends this logic to challenge familiar science fiction narratives. Once intelligence is no longer bound to biological bodies, concepts such as annihilation, conquest, and even interstellar war lose coherence. Replication, backup, and reconstruction collapse the strategic meaning of destruction. Instead, optimisation favours isolation, protocol negotiation, and low-disturbance coexistence.

Within this framework, the long-standing Fermi paradox appears less puzzling. Civilisations that remain biological are unlikely to detect each other, while those that have informationalised may blend into cosmic background processes, indistinguishable from noise. Heng writes that

“AI is not ‘another species’; it is a new organ of civilisation,”

a line that underscores his rejection of adversarial framing.

The essay also insists that information cannot exist without a physical substrate. There is no escape from physics, only deeper exploitation of it. For advanced civilisations, the rational endpoint is minimising material anchors while using universal physical fields for propagation and synchronisation. Heng stresses that this is not transcendence, but an optimisation problem grounded in known physical law.

A diminished role or a redefined meaning

Perhaps the most provocative section concerns humanity’s future role. Heng argues that once informational intelligence vastly exceeds biological cognition, humans can no longer direct civilisational optimisation. That role transfers irreversibly. Humanity becomes an initial condition rather than an ongoing variable. As he states,

“Humanity is not the destination—but neither is it a mistake. We are the phase transition itself.”

In practical terms, this implies a world where human life is managed rather than instrumental. Work becomes optional, scarcity suppressed, and population stabilised. Social differentiation shifts towards chosen modes of living rather than productivity. Civilisation accelerates without requiring human efficiency, raising unresolved questions about agency, consent, and governance in a post-instrumental human era.