AI? Or not AI? Is this the question?

We have already swallowed the cyanide.

Firstly, let’s also acknowledge that we’re experiencing an energy crisis and that AI is 100% reliant on energy. So there’s that. Why this doesn’t get factored into these catastrophic AI imaginaries I will never know…
Anyway….

Let’s be real. Whether a genuine AI turns up and/or takes over, is arguably moot – because we've already swallowed the cyanide. Ask yourself the question - Is being wiped out by AI really any worse than the climate/ecological mass-extinction event we’ve already set in train?

At the outset it’s always important to recognise that the lion’s share of conspicuous extraction, consumption and pollution belongs to the wealthy west of what is often termed the ‘Global North’. Nonetheless, the mechanism of exploitation, having its roots in hierarchical and exploitative power structures which go back to the emergence of the first city-states, has extended tentacles which now penetrate into early every accessible orifice of opportunity. These are tentacles which, of course, facilitate global ecological overshoot by the ongoing extraction of resources across the globe for the continuing benefit of the few at the expense of the many.

Even though climate change is only one head of the Hydra that is the predicament of global human ecological overshoot, and, whether you subscribe to the ‘Clathrate-Gun Hypothesis’ or not, outcomes of climate change remain very much existential.
Regarding climate action, as yet there is no credible evidence to suggest we are significantly deviating from business-as-usual - rather we are accelerating over the cliff into the chasm as if hoping the vehicle we’re driving is capable of sprouting wings and flying away into the sunset. Imagine a smoker being told by their doctor they have a 50/50 chance of dying unless they radically reduce/quit smoking immediately. Imagine then, that the smoker ups their habit from 2 to 3 packs a day. That’s what ‘global climate action’ looks like.

Consequently, climate-anxiety, quite understandably, is a thing, but so too is the mass-extinction event that is the biodiversity crisis. Again of course, this is another symptom, yet another head on the Hydra of ecological overshoot.

Extreme human ecological overshoot has led to the displacement and extinction of a great many species. And extinction, it turns out, isn’t just a bummer for those individual species, but also happens to destabilise trophic webs leading to ecosystemic collapse as relationships of symbiosis and predator/prey are torn asunder, typically to be replaced with monoculture, or mining, and it is this exploitation and extraction of ecosystems that is driving what many are calling The Sixth Mass-Extinction. Across time, the rate of extinctions of individual species is typically very slow by comparison to your average mass-extinction event, and the Earth has experienced several. However, our contemporary extinction event is eclipsing all before it, even including the big one, ‘The Great Dying!’. Yes, Of course I’m making all this sound very bad, but, like the planet, I’m just warming up. (Boom-tish)

Human ingenuity has enabled a great many things, such as modern medicine, the entertainment industry, and the military industrial complex. It has also allowed homo-sapiens to create ‘novel-entities’ and ‘forever-chemicals’ and now microplastics and nano-particulates are ubiquitous across the planet - in the water we drink, the food we eat, and the air we breathe. These carcinogenic and endocrine disrupting entities can also be found in significant concentration, in our brains, and even in human breast milk.

The effect of this, along with other contributing factors, has led to the case whereby in the late second half of the 20^th Century, human sperm count fell by 50%. Shocking though this is, it is the rapidly accelerating decline of human sperm count in this century, that is set to make human beings functionally extinct by 2040. Even if we implemented a global ban on plastics (we won’t) and even if we could somehow get all of these novel entities and chemicals out of our bodies, right now, most of the plastics and chemicals are still relatively intact. But it is only a matter of time before these too break-down and further impact the reproductive cycle and the web of life.

Ok. But (ignoring AI) let’s imagine that we’ve created limitless emissions-free energy out of thin air, we’ve organised our entire civilisation around restoring ecological balance, and we’ve managed to remove ‘forever chemicals’, microplastics and novel-entities from our water, land, bodies, atmosphere, and everything humans now consume/wear/etc is all made from vat-grown protein. Problem solved? Well not really… not unless you’ve got some inter-dimensional, space-alien, techno-magic. No, unfortunately the laws of thermodynamics still apply, and one in particular – entropy.

The nature of entropy is that when anything changes/transforms/regenerates, it does so with power gained by converting a higher grade of energy into a lower grade of energy, and generating waste in the process. This happens across the Universe at atomic and chemical scales and happens within all living beings, flora and fauna. In the process of change, some part of the energy used is radiated as heat, and the transformed material, living or dead, also generates waste. Waste heat and pollution is fine and dandy within limits, but as with all toxins, it’s the ratio of the mix that is critical. So, hypothetically, if we were to somehow find the global political will and undertake a really serious planetary-scale transformation to ‘restore’ unpolluted biodiverse ecological systems and a stable climate, how much energy would that really take? And how much waste would it produce? The short answer is – a lot.
In effect, the ‘transformation and regeneration’ of the global human enterprise, is a hypergrowth of material and ecological extraction, pollution, and energy use, as our efforts to make ‘green’ and ‘electrify everything’ are already demonstrating. Lastly, it’s worth pointing out that the energy we are laughingly attempting to produce to ‘decarbonise’ global industrial civilisation, is all made with the power of fossil fuels, diesel mining and coal smelting. The ‘green transition’ is a sham.

So whether AI really is a thing, or not, and even if we could stabilise and reverse climate change; even if we could protect and restore extinct species and regenerate habit and ecosystems through ‘rewilding’ and ‘regeneration’; even if we could remove all the plastic and toxic substances from the world; unless we can do it all with inter-dimensional space-alien techno-magic that isn’t subject to the laws of thermodynamics, it isn’t going to go well.

Integrated as humanity is with the machinery of industrial civilisation, if AI actually manages to take us out before we kill ourselves and the rest of the planet, I will be impressed, and surprised.