It's a bit like the movie Chinatown and the water wars of Los Angeles and the West. Who gets served? The productive fields of the Sacramento Valley or the growing urban populations of rain-deficit Southern California. Nothing has been so revolutionary as AI Its power, range, scope, and applications are staggering. Virtual reality was just the beginning. Now powered by AI, the virtual world has become more immediate and more real. The entire perceptual landscape has changed.
AI has challenged traditional views of what is and what isn't and expanded the cognitive and imaginative reach of everyone a billionfold. Its problem solving, research, and innovative potential is staggering. An accelerated technical development in all fields is here. And that is just the beginning.
Geopolitical positioning now hinges largely on AI. The Chinese without the doom-and-gloom badgering of the American Left, is going full steam ahead on energy production. No source of energy will be overlooked and soon its AI apparatus will be larger, more potent, and more significant than America's. China's productivity, innovation, and socio-economic influence will grow exponentially.
Forget the fact that Antarctic glaciers have been gaining ice in recent years, that there has been no precipitous warming of the climate, and that every dire environmentalist's warning of the coming climate disaster has been proven wrong. America cannot afford to be behind in the AI race, and it already is.
Even besides these practical issues, now that the global warming hysteria has cooled, the term 'adaptability' is being heard more and more. Especially with the rapid and remarkable advances made in both genetics and cybernetics, the world is approaching a post-human generation. In a relatively short time, human enterprise will be increasingly virtual and the human genome adjusted and transformed to adapt to any environmental influence.
Why should human beings be exempted from the miracles of genetic engineering which have enabled pest-resistant, fertilizer-independent, water-efficient plants? The human organism will soon be given the same innovative technical modifications. Human beings have always been adaptable, conforming to brutal winters and baking summers, building great cities in the harshest of climates, digging underground, over canals, against the tide. Now they themselves will be in the mix for adaptable survivability.
Even before that revolutionary change, urban and rural areas are already taking steps to adapt to global warming, whatever its cause. Renderings of a twenty-second century New York with vast wetlands, Venice-like canals, and a complete refashioning of seafronts have already been published. Farmers are experimenting with heat and drought-resistant crops, and northern farms of Saskatchewan and Manitoba preparing for longer growing seasons.
In classrooms throughout the United States during the worst of the climate hysteria, human beings were being blamed for provoking environmental catastrophe. Ignorance, obdurateness, myopia, and intellectual flaccidity, America's ethos, were once again preventing progressive action. Yet Epictetus was alive and well in some corners. Man is as much an integral part of the environment as any factor, sometimes an actor, sometimes acted upon.
It is intellectually false to assume man as the environmental predator, the destroyer, the pillager. All actions have repercussions, what comes around goes around, reap what you sow. Mankind has been decimated by plagues and environmental catastrophes not of his making. Human beings are no different from the dinosaurs.
Traditional Hindus have perhaps the best, most mature understanding of this phenomenon. The universe is periodically destroyed and renewed according to some ineluctable and unknowable plan. Man or some exogenous, unexpected event may cause the destruction; and just as forests are reborn after catastrophic fires, sometimes in more profusion and finery than before, so it will be with the world and its inhabitants.
'Defeatist, determinist, do-nothing resignation', say Western philosophers when they view India and Hinduism, imbued as they are with their culture's determination to make a difference, to change what is not right, to make the world a better place.
The world is but an illusion, say Hindus, and the only purpose for being is a revelation of the divine, a clearing of the path to enlightenment; and it is within that context that global warming is placed. It may or may not be happening, but to determine whether it is and to assess its cause and effect are vain, idle enterprises.
Philosophy is not such an idle enterprise. How can one look at the long trajectory of human history and not see that it repeats itself interminably. If human nature is aggressive, self-interested and self-protective, territorial, and expansionist, then every group of human society will be subject to it. Stoics look at history as an expression of a vast, impersonal, valueless and universal randomness; and as such should not be cause for concern. Nietzsche said that the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will.
There will always be an intersection of the practical and the philosophical. Even the most stoic scientist will work towards a greater, technologically-assisted human adaptability. The California farmer will look northward for the future. Miami will be awash but still vital. Stoicism does not imply inaction - human beings are not built that way. Survivalism and stoicism intersect and always will. It is just that hysteria has no place in the scope of things; and modern day progressivism with its hectoring assumptions of righteousness abouts everything cannot last.
Why is global warming off the front page? Because despite progressives' harshly critical view of the American unwashed, an ignorant lot barely worth saving, Americans have a more profound philosophical sense than any Washington activist.
One need not look at the new Webb telescope images with their scope of billions of light years, uncountable galaxies and infinite numbers of stars and planets to realize earth's insignificance and the happenstance of its inhabitants. Nor read Macbeth's lines about life's brief appearance on the stage full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Life is not one long slog of misery and hopelessness. The slog is not really that long and meaning is itself a meaningless construct. America is a hysterical country because it has no grounding philosophical construct. Christianity with its Book of Revelation is no solace, only providing fuel for the Armageddon doomsday naysayers found on every streetcorner.
'Whew, it's hot', an American was heard to say to an Indian in Delhi in July.
'It's summer', replied the Indian who went about his business; and so it will always be, the clash of fundamentalism, worrywarts and sadhus.
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