Tonight: Milton, Parenting Artificial Intelligence and Advocating for International Cooperation To Save Humanity From Itself
Satellite image of the hurricane Milton across its path through Florida. Credit: NASA.
In this blog post, I point you to a few crucial sources with whom you can follow up. I will also provide a personal angle on Milton and climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as tell you the types of climate change solutions toward which I am leaning.
Milton is hours away from Florida impact. I have a stake in this disaster, as in too many others in my past: family, friends, and university affiliations in the impact zone. I just flew from Maine to Saint Petersburg, Florida, to drop off my 84-year-old aunt so that she could recuperate from a nastily broken femur. The plan lasted two weeks. Yesterday, she evacuated in a wheelchair, driven up to Gainesville by a close friend of hers. Who knows when a medical specialist will be able to see her again or what lies ahead for her and millions of others in Florida?
It appears that the world, especially the US, is getting stranger, tougher and less predictable by the year if not by the month. The morbid zeitgeist is everywhere. What can I say to you in this blog that you might not hear elsewhere?
Most, if not all, of ELA Nonprofit Consulting’s readers know that if there is any chance of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change, it rests with electing Vice President, Kamala Harris, to the U.S. Presidency. For those of you who understand that, you should vote and donate as soon as possible. Yet, much more is needed. According to the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, "We are never going to meet" the climate goals anyway. He suggests we let Artificial intelligence solve the problem. Left-wing podcaster Sam Seder of The Majority Report provided a cynical critique of Schmidt yesterday.
Notwithstanding The Majority Report’s acerbic and ad hominem attack on Schmidt and however depressing the implication, an overwhelming consensus of top climate scientists offered a “final warning” on climate change over 1.5 years ago regarding the “irrevocable damage that only swift and drastic action can avert.”
What knowledgeable observer believes the international “community” can cooperate to achieve the necessary results, particularly given China and the USA’s unwillingness to limit greenhouse gas emissions and the epidemic of violent conflict around the world?
For the past 18 years, as founder and director of ELA Nonprofit Consulting (formerly Environment Bolivia and Environment Las Americas), I have researched climate change mitigation and adaptation and advocated for solutions, sometimes in the streets. Nevertheless, I am distraught to say that I agree with Mr. Schmidt’s analysis regarding meeting the U.N. climate change targets.
Although it is quite difficult to accept, particularly because of its heavy use of natural resources, Artificial Intelligence will be a necessary condition of any solution that the international community hopes to function, as will wind power, solar power, and nuclear energy, the latter of which I was opposed to for most of my life.
Admittedly, leveraging Artificial Intelligence is a “Hail Mary” pass for humanity as we likely come within years, not decades, of the end of human history as we have known it. For this climate advocate, as for the bestselling author, Yuval Noah Harari, whose work is linked just above, we must birth and raise Artificial Intelligence agents to be better stewards than their parents have been.
There are extreme dangers in parenting AI. Nevertheless, feasible alternative solutions are not acceptable to the vast majority of the world’s population, myself included, who have become addicted to fossil fuel and its byproducts and will not tolerate the drop in standard of living that would be required for the kind of drastic measures for which the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other scientific experts call. Greenhouse gas emission math is more of a dismal science now than economics ever has been. Greenhouse gas math does not add up in our favor, within the constraints of current human intelligence.
We have arrived at a moment in history in which truth will very likely be stranger or as strange as the following fiction. Relevant trailers are provided below, and the reader is highly encouraged to watch or rewatch these films in their entirety:
The 1984 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Terminator
The 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Unfortunately, though, Schmidt’s solution has a major failing, as Harari sadly emphasizes. We return to the necessity of international cooperation to parent Artificial Intelligence. If the countries of the world act as high-conflict, violently estranged parents, as many of the world’s superpowers and their proxies are acting now, AI will very likely follow our lead. Therefore, William Ury’s call for the Possible in order to help us thrive in the age of conflict, hope and human stewardship are still necessary even if we opt to pass the baton to AI.
Therefore, we must return to a significant subtext of ELA Nonprofit Consulting’s mission: international cooperative action. I refer the reader, again, as in a prior blog post, to Citizens’ Climate International (CCI) and others like it.
Meanwhile, may God bless my aunt, Floridians, the United States of America and the citizens and noncitizens of all countries of the world. And let’s ACT NOW so that we can possibly avoid the bad outcomes of The Terminator and 2001 Space Odyssey and hold onto hope for future generations, and, actually, for ourselves. The future arrives tonight.
Adam R. Zemans
