[Submitted to Pearls & Irritations]

The famous Japanese movie animator Hayao Miyazaki thinks “AI is an insult to life itself”. We are losing faith in our human capacities. We are trying to make machines that take over more and more of the things we do. Why?

So-called artificial intelligence is not just another labour-saving device. The logic of it is that it will replace us. Or rather, it will replace many of our activities with cheap imitations, including some of our most intimate and human activities.

When I listen to Beethoven’s Tempest sonata, or to Schubert’s sublime string quintet, I know I am engaging with another human being, sharing their anguish and triumph, being admitted into their inner-most feelings, even though they might be long dead. I am not interested in something that might sound superficially like them but that comes out of a machine.

Despite all the fuss, the present generation of ‘AI’ seems to produce stuff that only resembles what it purports to be. Alleged scientific papers reportedly contain citations to work that does not exist. That is not science, that is fiction.

Real human beings have some unique qualities. We are highly social, with many behaviours tuned to support the viability of the small groups we used to live in. We are extremely creative: just listen to how a small child uses the language they are passionately learning. We are not the caricatures, the travesties that people fought over in the benighted twentieth century, neither just cooperators nor just competitors. We balance competition and cooperation, all the time. The richness of life grows out of this balancing, as Taoists figured out long ago, with their complementary concepts of Yang and Yin. We are at our most human as we negotiate the complexities of our relationships. I agree with Miyazaki.

Over the past couple of years large components of the global climate system have deviated far outside their previous ranges of fluctuation: North Atlantic sea temperatures, Antarctic sea ice, global ocean temperatures. Many weather events have been not just record-breaking but freakish. The 2022 Lismore flood peaked two meters above the previous record: accounting for greater width and greater flow speed as well, there must have been five or ten times as much water as in past events.

Tipping points in complex systems like the global climate system cannot be predicted with any confidence, but they do typically go through bigger fluctuations as they approach tipping. Our global climate system is showing every sign of approaching a tipping point, and for all we know it may be in the act of tipping.

To be clear, ‘tipping’ means sliding into thermal runaway because natural reinforcing feedbacks overwhelm anything we might be able to do to reverse it. It means global temperatures rising by 4°C, 6°C or even more, drastic shifts in regional climate zones, mass extinctions of other species, plagues and pandemics, and an alien world for our descendants to try to survive in. The global industrial system would be long gone, nations would disintegrate, anarchy would prevail and the human population would plummet.

Industries and politicians persist with practices and policies that are not only inadequate to address the climate emergency, lately they have taken to actively exacerbating the problem. The approval of a Woodside proposal to process natural gas from the Northwest Shelf until 2070 seems to be a wilful violation of any duty of care, for our children or for anyone, in Australia or on the planet.

Pollution of the planet by plastic has emerged as a global threat to people and wildlife. Remote beaches are littered with plastic trash, and wildlife of many kinds are accumulating plastic in their guts. Microplastic fragments are said to permeate virtually the entire planetary environment and all of our bodies. 

Most plastics do not degrade into harmless substances. Most of them either cannot be recycled or are not recycled by our wasteful, once-through industrial system. There have been some efforts to eliminate single-use soft plastics, but with only limited success.

There is no serious effort to tackle this problem. The oil industry has been actively promoting ever-greater use of plastics to compensate for its anticipated loss of the market for fuel oil. The only real solution is to cut the flow of non-recyclable plastic at its source. This might stimulate the industry to create plastics that readily degrade into harmless substances. 

Otherwise the world got along fine using glass, cardboard and metal in the time before plastics. This of course will be reproached as a shockingly regressive attitude. Do you want to ‘progress’ into the abyss, or to survive with more-than-adequate comfort?

There are other ways we are working to do ourselves in. Julian Cribb has documented ten ways, including fresh water scarcity, resource scarcity, poisonous chemical pollutants, topsoil degradation, pandemics, overpopulation, ecosystem collapse, other harmful technologies like nanotechnologies or biotechnologies, plus the ones already mentioned here. To his great credit Cribb is a co-founder of the Council for the Human Future and an advocate for an Earth Systems Treaty.

You have to say we are collectively deluded, collectively insane. Why can’t the world say ‘enough’? An immediate reason is that someone can make a buck out of plastics, AI, fossil fuels. If someone can then, as our society is presently structured, someone will.

But it’s not just greed. The feudal lords were greedy but they didn’t bring the entire world down around their ears. It is greed plus a built-in requirement to be competitive, plus what Jason Hickel calls ‘artificial scarcity’. There are never quite enough jobs, though there could be, and used to be in the 1960s. That’s how they keep us running on the treadmill.

I have written at length about the many myths by which we are misgoverned.  If we wish to survive then we need to face up to all of the common beliefs that are readily shown to be wrong, not just a few favourite gripes. However even progressives don’t seem to be very interested in pursuing that level of understanding, so we know how the machine works, and how we might turn it off.

Given the lack of interest in such understanding, and how removed the political culture is from the kind of reform that would make a serious difference, I now conclude that we will not avoid the apocalypse. There might still be a slim chance of avoiding the worst if we got on with what is needed. But the politics here and abroad is either moving much too slowly or moving in the opposite direction.

It hurts me to say this about the world my grandchildren will inherit, but I think they are fated to enter a dark age. I hope I am wrong.