The Holy Ghost in the Machine

"Artificial Intelligence rightly belongs in the Trinity with evil gods Pandemic and Atomic. "

After “Trantor" by Alexander Sköld

 

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

— Leaders from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and other A.I. labs,
“A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn,”
The New York Times, May 30, 2023

Last week we took a long look at a recent colloquy between Nate Hagens and Daniel Schmachtenberger on Hagens’ podcast, The Great Simplification. Schmachtenberger is a systems thinker and elegantly connects dots, often in ways we’ve not considered before. Hagens wanted to link the dots between the Superorganism, Metacrisis, and Artificial General Intelligence.

The Superorganism is the product of our evolution as civilization{s) since emerging from the last Ice Age. It has entered a terminal phase for reasons concerning design (or lack thereof). The Four Horsemen Bill Joy foretold in 2000 are Geno, Nano, Robo and Nuke. And as AI Industry leaders now warn, if AI is employed to assist but given essentially the same design instruction set, it will accelerate the termination. One of the design flaws is how we have internalized the social invention of money while externalizing its underpinnings in both energy and ecology.

Hagens: [M]oney is a claim on energy. And energy from fossil hydrocarbons is incredibly powerful, indistinguishable from magic effectively on human time scales. It's also not infinite. And as a society we are drawing down the bank account of fossil carbon and non-renewable inputs like cobalt and copper and neodymium and water aquifers and forests, millions of times faster than they were sequestered.

Last week we saw how AI accelerates mining of cobalt and copper and the demand for everything. Artificial Intelligence exists in a realm just below the tangible surface—a Holy Ghost in the Machine. It rightly belongs in the Trinity with evil gods Pandemic and Atomic. This week I want to shift focus to the light at the end of the tunnel. What is the way out? In part that will have to involve mending the mistaken assumptions of economics, or the field of science developed by Herman Daly, Robert Costanza, Clive Cutler and more recently Steve Keen, generally called ecological economics, or more recently, biophysical economics.

Schmachtenberger: And whether we're talking about pricing carbon or pricing copper or pricing, anything as you say, well we price things at the cost of extraction plus a tiny margin defined by competition. And that was not what it cost the Earth to produce those things or the cost to the ecosystem and other people of doing it.  

So the proper pricing is really very deep to the topic of perverse incentives. And yet … this is core to the progress narrative, right? Because the thing that we're advancing that drives the revenue or the profit is the progress thing, the cost to the environment; that we're extracting something unrenewably that is going to cap out; that we’re turning it into pollution. And we're doing it for differential advantage of some people over other people and affecting other species in the process. [For] the stakeholders that benefit, you get a progress narrative. [For] the stakeholders that don't benefit, you get a non-progress narrative….

Internalizing true costs is actually the easy part. Well, relatively. It is politically toxic, as we see in the recent brinksmanship in the United States over paying down the national debt. The debt ceiling enormously benefits a nation that is the world’s reserve currency because it sends more dollars into circulation worldwide. The higher it raises its debt limit the more money flows back into its treasury with interest at a rate it gets to dictate. This time the table limit—the sheer volume of wealth that flows back to the United States—was raised only after ransoming welfare recipients, taking salaries away from tax-collectors to pad the wallets of tax-cheat millionaires, and incentivizing new oil fields and pipelines.

Thus, part of the solution must inevitably involve game theory, or what Daly, Costanza and other new order economists have identified as deeply embedded behaviors.

Schmachtenberger: Doing things that destroy everything just becomes a cost of doing business, [there is] no real deterrent. So the corporation [read: AI] will privatize the gain, socialize the losses, and the actual people who make the decisions have a bunch of upside and no relative downside. … Those who are more opportunity-focused build the corporations and become worth tens of millions or tens of billions of dollars. They have all that power to also influence lobbying and influence public opinion. And those who do the safety analysis run tiny non-profits that nobody listens to.

For all their dark meditations on various evils loose in the world, Hagens and Schmachtenberger still manage to point towards the light at the end of the tunnel.

Schmachtenberger: There is nothing innate to our biology that is the problem. There is something innate to the particular trajectory of the civilizational system that is. We do not get to continue this civilizational system and what it conditions in people. So then the question is, ‘What does it take to create environments that could condition the wisdom in people that in turn reinforces those environments,’ right? —the bottom-up effects of the wiser humans creating different societies and the top-down effects of different societies having an incentive to develop different things in the people.

Ecovillages like mine have been blazing that trail for 50 years. We can feel the change. It only takes enough people of good heart to make it happen.

Our recommended strategy, which does not exclude others but could conceivably work in reversing climate change all on its own, contains these elements:

• Ecovillages and cooperative experiments of all shapes and sizes, both urban and rural;
• Rewilding, by means of marine, forest and land area reserves—a third to half of the bio-temperate and habitable planet being zoned for human exclusion (acknowledging 90% would be better);
• Active and passive carbon dioxide removal (biochar, afforestation, remineralization, and marine permaculture);
• Animal-integrated agroforestry enterprises;
• Edible landscaping, holistic and keyline management (permaculture);
• Biorock coral regeneration, raising coastlines and islands more rapidly than sea level rise;
• Natural building;
• Protection and popularization of indigenous culture and wisdom;

• 

  Haiga by Paul Reps

  Reduction of human population;
• Disarmament, demilitarization and denuclearization at the mine face; and
• Socially just biophysical economics.

All of these could be reduced to just the first bullet point but most people don’t understand ecovillages as a concept enough to understand that all the other bullet points are part of our vision and mission. We are shifting the paradigm by bottom-up voluntary actions, principally coming from the generation having the most to lose. We are, to use the words of Daniel Schmachtenberger, “wiser humans creating different societies” (the bottom-up effects) and then, by participating in UN or other conferences, lobbying for legislation and voting, generating “the top-down effects … to develop different things.”

It is not rocket science. Be the change you want to see. What you quickly discover is that life becomes better in myriad ways.

Meanwhile, let’s end this war. Towns, villages, and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. There are 70 sites in Ukraine and 500 around the region. As you read this, we are sheltering some 2,000 adults and 450 children. We call our project “The Green Road.” 

For most of the children refugees, this will be their first experience in ecovillage living. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad or read this recent article in Mother Jones. Thank you for your help.

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The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed climate change, a juggernaut threat to all life, humans included. We had a trial run at emergency problem-solving on a global scale with COVID — and we failed. 6.88 million people, and counting, have died. We ignored well-laid plans to isolate and contact trace early cases; overloaded our ICUs; parked morgue trucks on the streets; incinerated bodies until the smoke obscured our cities as much as the raging wildfires. The modern world took a masterclass in how abysmally, unbelievably, shockingly bad we could fail, despite our amazing science, vast wealth, and singular talents as a species.

Having failed so dramatically, so convincingly, with such breathtaking ineptitude, do we imagine we will now do better with climate? Having demonstrated such extreme disorientation in the face of a few simple strands of RNA, do we imagine we can call upon some magic power that will arrest all our planetary-ecosystem-destroying activities?

As the world emerges into pandemic recovery (maybe), there is growing recognition that we must learn to do better. We must chart a pathway to a new carbon economy that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience. We must lead by good examples; carrots, not sticks; ecovillages, not carbon indulgences. We must attract a broad swath of people to this work by honoring it, rewarding it, and making it fun. That is our challenge now.

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Thank you for reading The Great Change.