This short essay on climate change and AI is from my Thinking Out Loud column in our September newsletter. Subscribe for more!
When I was a wee lad growing up in the sixties, nuclear war, mutually assured destruction, or MAD, was the apocalypse du jour.
Splitting the atom ended the war and ushered in a new world order. By the 1960s, that new world included schoolchildren huddled under their desks, covering their heads with their hands, practicing for the end of the world.
Some sixty years on, we live in a post-modern world nothing like that turbulent, transformative, often violent decade. But only in form. Despite the obvious technological and cultural differences between then and now, it feels vaguely the same, hiding under our virtual desks, our heads buried in distraction and division.
Climate Change and Artificial Intelligence: What, Me Worry?
You have likely heard the AI Cassandras marching up and down the digital sidewalk with their virtual placards warning that the end is near (very near), and that we are the seeds of our own destruction. We are Frankenstein; AI is the monster.
These stark warnings have spilled out as one news story after another about rogue AI agents breaking free and potentially creating havoc in the real world where humans live. It is unsettling.
Or is it?
After all, climate Cassandras like me have been warning of the dangers of climate change for nigh on 20 years now. As the consequences of decades of climate inaction take center stage with greater frequency and intensity, proving what we’ve been warning about all this time, a new kid on the block comes along to steal our existential thunder.
I am being facetious. I find it therapeutic to find humor in chaos, and these are hilarious times.
Will AI Save Us Before It Kills Us?
AI’s singular race to AGI (artificial general intelligence) mirrors AGW (anthropogenic global warming). Both could pose an existential threat to humanity if we don’t address them urgently and competently. Isn’t that adorable?
As AI expands, its energy and water demands threaten communities, ecosystems, and the future, much like unchecked manmade climate change. It’s a little ironic that so many people still hope AI can help solve our energy, climate, and environmental predicament. That is, as long as neither one takes us down first.
Now, this can feel a tad overwhelming. In fact, if this doesn’t feel overwhelming, you’re probably not paying attention. I can understand the desire to hide under a desk and let all the madness subside. In fact, I climbed out from under the desk just to write this brief missive, because here’s the thing. We can wish for a simpler time, a more congenial time, a time when we didn’t feel pushed and pulled by incompetent, incapable, incoherent leadership, or feel what little monetary cushion we possess getting sucked up into the greedy hands of megalomaniacs and narcissists (I’m not naming names. You can guess).
Yes, I know the feeling. But there is no going back to a time before AI entered our lives, or the growing reality of climate change, or any of the profusion of modern challenges we face in an increasingly complex human endeavor.
Complexity does not imply stability, resilience, or wisdom. I remember talk, way back, of how the threat of nuclear annihilation revealed how an increasingly complex, technological civilization was quickly outstripping our wisdom to control it.
And here we are. The world is even more dangerous and complicated than ever. Is human wisdom tracking that same upward trajectory? At best, that’s debatable.
What could possibly go wrong? Let’s ask Claude.
Or better yet, let’s ask ourselves: what kind of world do we want? If we can imagine a better world. If we can imagine a better world and believe in its possibility, then there is hope.
I often say that hope is when we stop fooling ourselves (it isn’t my line, but I like it). Alternatively, we can think that we can’t fool ourselves into thinking there is no hope.
