AI: Friend or Foe of Climate Action? Yes.
We Can’t Ignore the Potential of AI to Help Because We See How It Can Hurt
Hope for achieving our vision, purpose, and Major Goal — overcoming climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything — comes from the Four Catalytic Sources of Transformation, or The Catalytic Four.
They are:
The Climate Movement
Climate Action Supporters
ARTC or the accelerating rate of technological change, and
Governments-and-Markets
All are indispensable. They must be interrelated.
I haven’t yet written a ton on our Third Catalytic Source, ARTC, so I thought it was about time to start the discussion of one way ARTC can contribute: AI.
But first, a quick ARTC review.
ARTC Recap
Today’s accelerating rate of tech change wasn’t inevitable. Nor was it the result of some gradual historical process. As the graphs below suggest, tech change, the major driver of economic growth (responsible for about 85-90%) shot up like a rocket during the Industrial Revolution and continues its path straight up.
ARTC happened and keeps going due to the continual production of useful knowledge generated by what I call the “ARTC-Combo”: (1) specialization; (2) nonrivalry of knowledge, i.e., its endlessly copyable and useable nature, and; (3) market competition.
This combo isn’t stopping, isn’t slowing down. It’s speeding up, and AI will send it into hyperdrive.
What The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters need to do is push the ARTC-Combo to create strategic ARTC, i.e., ARTC that helps us achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.
AI: Friend or Foe? Support or Oppose? Believe the Hype?
Let me get a few things out of the way first.
» Stop AI?
For those who oppose AI, is there a way to stop it, to put the genie back in the bottle?
NO.
There’s way too much $$ invested. For example, AI data center investment by Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Oracle in the US will top $1 trillion next year, about 20% of total US business investment.
Even if AI advancement were to stop in the rest of the world, China would continue to go along its merry way. Given that its rapid advances, now rivaling Western counterparts, has taken place via open source software, if everyone else stopped it would slow them down. But it wouldn’t stop them. Their leader, Xi Jinping, has an expansive vision for AI.
There’s no stopping AI.
» Support or Oppose?
YES.
We should oppose:
AI data centers that suck up scarce water, drive up electricity bills, and turn on fossil generated electricity, both old coal-burning power plants and new natural gas plants, as I discussed earlier; they must generate and store their own energy with renewables plus storage — not natural gas! — and find ways to keep their hardware cool without draining local water supplies;
so-called techno-fascism and the current inherent tendencies with AI that make it amenable to fascism and authoritarianism;
AI development without safeguards that ensure autonomous AI acts within appropriate ethical boundaries, as should artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI) once they exist.
But we should actively support efforts to have AI help us overcome climate change.
» Friend or Foe?
So is AI a friend or foe to The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters, the first and second Catalytic Sources of Transformation?
YES.
Our job is to help make sure that all types of AI are friends and not foes. For some of us, this is our Field of Action, our role, our calling, within The Climate Movement.
» Believe the AI/Climate Hype?
So, how much help should we expect from AI? Should we believe the AI hype about solving climate change?
NO.
As Ramesh Srinivasan and Emily Jacobi recently put it:
We’ve heard repeated promises from leaders like Sam Altman, who says AI will solve climate and affordability crises, if only we feed it enough water, energy and minerals. As technologists who have worked on machine learning tools, we know this to be a fantasy. Machine learning and language models can be helpful tools, but they cannot rewrite the basic facts of material reality.
The AI/Climate hype is just the latest version of what I call the markets-and-techno-magic BS that’s been around for decades: we don’t have to do anything really because the magic of the markets and unknown future tech miracles will swoop in and solve climate right at the last minute when we most need it. This markets-and-techno-magic dodge has been pushed primarily by politicians who didn’t want to do the early heavy lifting on climate action.
Now it’s being deployed by the tech bros, the broligarchy, to justify whatever they need to run the world. They tell us the tech miracle is almost here in the form of AI. Don’t worry, be happy. AI and the broligarchy will save our butts.
We aren’t looking for AI and the tech bros to save us.
We need to make one thing crystal clear: we aren’t looking for AI and the tech bros to save us.
We Just Can’t Wait to Create Speed and Scale
Why isn’t climate being overcome right now at speed and scale? It’s not because we don’t have the tech to do so today. We do. We already have the tech we need.
Even though helpful tech is getting better every day, we don’t need to wait for better tech and cheaper tech to get going in a big way. We already have profits and price working in our favor — an absolutely huge accomplishment decades in the making! This means market dynamics can work for us.
But the fossils and their political lackeys and the physical, political, regulatory, and bureaucratic infrastructure of the 20th Century energy systems are holding us back. The fossils will do everything they can to wring out every last drop of profit from their death products, such as over $93 billion in windfall profits from the Iran War, almost doubling their profits from the previous year as climate impacts heat up. So we’ve got lots of work to do to have markets working for us like they should. This won’t happen without The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters pushing the fourth Catalytic Sources of Transformation, Governments-and-Markets, to do so.
We can’t wait for AI’s help with new and better solutions before we get going in a big way on speed and scale — and we don’t have to.
At the same time, we also must push for our Third Catalytic Source of Transformation, ARTC, to play its part and help us achieve speed and scale: strategic ARTC, focused-climate-action ARTC.
Real Justice, Not Technoblesse Oblige From the Broligarchy
And not just speed and scale. We can’t be for big and fast and unjust. We are to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. As we achieve speed and scale we must do so in ways that also achieve the three actions of justice: stopping bad stuff, setting wrong right, and making things better. We must bring our three forms of power — moral power, people power, and staying power — to bear on our quest for justice. We won’t accept crumbs from the broligarchy, no faux technoblesse oblige.
AI & Climate Action
So with all these caveats, all these potential dangers, can AI help us?
Not if we passively sit around waiting for it to. Not if we simply say No because it’s easier to simplistically oppose stuff.
Thankfully, there are some who see the realistic possibilities for AI to help us with climate action and are working to make them happen.
We should actively help scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs working for better approaches vi AI, including those who are Climate Movement Artist-Athletes striving upon this, their Field of Action.
And what are these efforts? Stay tuned!
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