Mutually Assured Distraction: Why Worry About Climate Change When AI Will Get Us First?

Earthbound, the podcast helping people like you, who feel anxious about climate change challenge the narratives that feel overwhelmed and reconnect with the natural world, to help you stay grounded in what you're protecting rather than consumed by what's being lost.

Hello, I'm Thomas Schuenemann, and this is Earthbound.

In the Global Warming Is Real newsletter that I publish, I set aside a section called Thinking Out Loud.

There's no guests, no news, no interview, just a question I can't quite shake.

Turned over a few times to see what's underneath, and this one started out as a joke, or something close to one.

For the better part of 20 years, I've been one of those people warning about climate change.

And now, just as those warnings are coming true, along comes artificial intelligence to claim the title of the thing most likely to do us in.

So I asked myself the obvious why worry about climate change when AI will get us first?

What follows is a short essay.

It wanders back to a classroom in the 1960s, it borrows a line from Mad magazine, and it lands, I hope, somewhere more useful than despair.

Let's think out loud.

When I was a wee lad growing up in the 60s, nuclear war or Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD was the apocalypse du jour, in the case of nuclear or radiological fallout, people living around potential targets such as military bases.

Splitting the atom ended the war, allowing a new world order to emerge.

But by the 1960s, that New World included school children huddled under their desks, covering their heads with their hands, practicing for the end of the world.

And I was one of those school children some 60 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.

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 and potentially creating havoc in the real world where humans live.

And it is unsettling.

Or is it?

After all, climate Cassandras like me have been warning the dangers of climate change for nigh on 20 years now.

And just as the consequences of decades of climate inaction take center stage with greater frequency and intensity, bearing out what we've been warning about all this time, a new kid on the block comes to seal our existential thunder.

And I am being facetious.

And I find it therapeutic to find humor in chaos.

And these, my friends, are hilarious times.

There's a kind of symmetry between AI's singular race to AGI, or artificial general intelligence, and AGW, anthropogenic global warming.

Both pose a potential existential threat to humanity if we don't deal with them urgently, incompetently.

And isn't that adorable?

As AI expands, its energy and water demands threaten communities, ecosystems and the future, much like unchecked man made climate change.

And 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 all feel a tad overwhelming.

And in fact, if it doesn't feel overwhelming, I suggest you aren't paying attention.

And I can understand the desire to hide under a desk and let the madness subside.

In fact, I claimed 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.

I think you can guess.

Yeah, 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 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 the same upward trajectory at best?

That's debatable.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, 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, believe in its possibility, then there is hope.

I often say that hope is when we stop fooling ourselves.

I don't think I came up with that line, but I do like it.

But another way to look at this is that we can stop fooling ourselves.

That there is no hope.

And that, my friends, is.

Or the thoughts of a simple man.

Thanks for listening to this.

Short essay.

The original text version was published in our global warmingisreal.com newsletter.

Check the Show Notes to subscribe to that newsletter for more thinking out Loud essays, articles, and information on climate change and environmental stewardship.

If you like what we're doing, please like and subscribe to Earthbound wherever you listen to your favorite podcast.

I'm Thomas Schueneman, and this is Earthbound, the podcast for people anxious about climate change.

Challenge the narratives that fuel, overwhelm, and reconnect with the natural world to help you stay grounded in what you're protecting rather than consumed by what's being lost.

Thank you, dear listener.

We'll see you next time.

And until then, stay safe.

Sa.