I was born in the 1960s, which means I am among the first generation to grow up with color TV. This also means I am also among the first Americans who are able to see their past in color. Or, at least, the urban landscape of our past. Maybe that’s why I love old TV shows like The Rockford Files—shows with a lot of exterior shots of working class cities and suburbs from back then. Once in a while, Rockford will race through Los Angeles and there, flashing by in the background, a McDonald’s from 1976 will appear. Or maybe a Woolworth’s or a Wash King. (Yes, I do realize that most people have never heard of Woolworth’s or Wash King.)
These were the places I would visit with my parents when I was a kid, and it’s kind of neat to see them again, if only on a TV screen. Seeing them today, forty years later, I am often struck by how different the architecture was back then, especially the fast-food joints and coffee shops, many of which were getting on even when Rockford was in his prime. These vintage buildings from the 50s and 60s often had weird, playful curves and tilted walls, all of it stitched together at crazy angles. I remember one restaurant in particular that my mom used to take me to every weekend. It had plastic booths nestled under a rocket-red awning with trippy lights hanging down. It looked like something straight out of The Jetsons.
Ever since the first publicly available AI SaaS offerings (that’s Software-as-a-Service for all you non-geeks) like ChatGTP hit the market, the media ecosystem has been in love with the subject of AI as a major disruptive force. Disruptive, that is, in the creative industries hitherto regarded as safe from any kind of automation: illustration, film-making, acting, and writing. Story after story has run about how AI-generated art, screenplays, journalistic articles, etc. might soon replace the work of human content creators.
Within this maelstrom, a smaller, subset of articles has begun circulating related to whether AI will ever achieve consciousness. (Some experts believe it already has.) And, within this subset, there is a sub-subset devoted to what I call AI alarmism. That is, the idea that AI, if left to its own devices, might soon overthrow—and perhaps even exterminate—humanity itself, ala the “evil AI” tropes of the Terminator films, the Matrix films, the Tron films, et cetera, et cetera.
Such visions of an AI apocalypse are not new. Hal, the murderous supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is perhaps the most famous example of an AI gone bad. And a cool but largely forgotten movie from the 1970s called Colossus: The Forbin Project lays out exactly how a psychotic AI (in this case, one entrusted with the care and maintenance of the American nuclear arsenal, just like SkyNet) could take over the world by force.
In his amazingly good sci-fi novel, The Peripheral, William Gibson describes a environmental cataclysm called The Jackpot. The name is perfect, in that it evokes not a single-cause catastrophe but rather a horrific alignment (like the diamonds on a slot machine) of multiple ones. Global heating. Drought. Pollution. Pandemics. Poverty. Et cetera.
But, as is ruefully noted by the protagonists of Gibson’s novel, The Jackpot hit at almost the same time as a technological revolution (actually several revolutions) that might have avoided it. Geoengineering. Nanotechnology. Artificial Intelligence. Fusion power. Genetic engineering.
All of these fields are exploding, right now, in the early 21st Century. That’s why I’m guarded optimistic about humanity’s chances of surviving the next fifty years. (Note that I said “surviving”; it’s going to be incredibly challenging, and will involve great suffering and sacrifice.) Many environmentalists scoff at this kind of optimism. There is no technological silver bullet, they warn, that will get us off the hook.
And, of course, they’re right. There is no big silver bullet. But there might be a lot of small silver bullets that, if aimed precisely (have I tortured this metaphor long enough?) might at least blunt the looming crisis.
After all, we’ve been here before. In the mid-20th Century, scientists were warning that current agriculture techniques would not be sufficient to feed the booming post-war population of Earth. A global famine was almost inevitable. But it didn’t happen. Why? Well, in a word, we innovated our way out of it. Improved science resulted in the so-called Green Revolution, which allowed farmers to feed millions more people on the same amount of arable land (which they continue to do to this day).
So, I like to collect articles about possible new “revolutions” that might help us survive, and even thrive, in this century. Here is an article for The Guardian about how scientists are manipulating natural enzymes to break down plastic into basic nutrients (i.e., food). Yes, plastic into food. Will it pan out? Will it be scalable? I don’t know. But it gives me hope.
Recently I was enjoying a long-distance phone chat with an old friend of mine, and the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to the weather. She lives in Ohio, I live in Florida, and yet our answers to our respective inquiries about “How’s the weather where you are” were identical: Hot AF.
Fortunately, scientists like David Keith have been telling us for years that we are not helpless in the battle against climate change. If worse comes to worst, for a few billion dollars we could deploy specialized aircraft to release particles of sulfur (or some more exotic material) into the upper atmosphere, thus reflecting enough sunlight back into space to cool the planet very quickly. Of course, as professor David warns, we have a poor grasp of what possible, global side-effects such a radical course of action might have (although one one wonders if these side-effects could be any worse than a Canada-sized wildfire or a continent-wide heat-wave in India). It is precisely because of these unknown side-effects, he explains, that we need to start thinking about the problem now, with a clear head.
Along these lines, one of the strangest—and yet most encouraging—options to the “solar dimming” set of possible mitigation strategies is the idea that we might blast moondust into outer space. Yeah. For real. This dust, if aimed properly, would linger in one of the Lagrange points between the earth and the sun and, for a time, reduce solar radiation falling on the earth’s surface. The effect would be short-lived due to solar wind blowing the dust away into interplanetary space, but this is a good thing in that the technique would thus be throttleable. We could blast as much as or little dust as needed to cool the planet without plunging it inadvertently into a new ice age. (Have you seen that movie SnowPiercer?) Also, unlike the sulfur-in-the-sky option, the lunar dust wouldn’t contribute to air pollution or acid rain here on earth.
Obviously, the notion that we might somehow shoot lunar dust into space on a routine, industrial scale seems like science fiction. But is it? The space agencies of many nations such as the U.S., China, and Japan have planned future missions to the moon. One can imagine a gradual infrastructure of settlements, supplies, and equipment gathering on the moon over time, much as one formed in the American West in the 19th Century. One could presumably build some kind of mass-driver or rail-gun that could shoot the dust into space, and power it with solar energy. (Extra power could be stored during the two-week long lunar “day” to keep the gun shooting during the “night”).
How much would such a setup cost? Billions? Trillions? On the other hand, how much would it cost to rescue two-hundred million people from Europe if the Atlantic thermohaline circulation is disrupted, as some scientists predict it will? Or to build sea-walls around New York and Miami and San Diego and every other major coastal city? Or to feed South America if the crops there dry up during the next heat wave?
It’s time to think outside-the-box, people.
If worse comes to worst, we shouldn’t rule out going back to the moon. And building a huge cannon there. Or anything else we have to do to cool off the planet.
Here is the original article on SingularityHub where I learned about this idea:
It’s hot as hell in Gainesville, as one would expect of Florida in July. But I mean, it’s really, really hot as hell.
All over the country, people are feeling the effects of the climate change. Even the most hard-core deniers (some of which are people in my own extended family, whom I love) are starting to sense the truth about what we’re facing as a civilization.
Unlike many, however, I think we can innovate our way out of the mess before it’s too late. But we need a World War II level mobilization of effort and resources to tackle it. In keeping with that idea, here is a cool video explaining one of the best weapons we have in the battle against global warming: carbon capture. No, it’s not a silver bullet, but it is part of the solution.
Even though I live in Florida, I am guardedly optimistic about our chances of surviving (I almost typed weathering–HA!) the global warming crisis. New green technologies are being created everyday, and the ones we’ve already got have to the potential to completely transform the world.
Here is a recent, positive article from one my favorite websites, Inhabitat.com.
Ash Clifton, Writer 