The New Environmental Hysteria - AI, Global Warming, And The Aladdin's Lamp Paradigm

The old Arab fairy tale of Aladdin and the genie who comes out of the lamp and can't be put back is the story of every new technological invention.  Despite the howling over the horseless carriage, the telephone, the computer, social media, recombinant DNA, and the cell phone, once they were produced and in use, there was no going back to an earlier, simpler age.  

 

The same is true for Artificial Intelligence (AI). Although it is only a few years old, it has revolutionized the way we think, interact, learn, and create.  It is perhaps the most revolutionary of all modern inventions, for it will lead the way to a post-human generation.  Within decades the world will be robotic, instantaneous, and virtual.  

The post-human generation will be characterized by complete mind-computer interface, an artificially mediated intelligence, and DNA reconfigured to adapt to a warming climate, refine and perfect the human physical organism, and create a race of highly intelligent, beautiful, athletic, and creative people.  Old distinctions of identity, race, gender, and ethnicity will disappear as prospective parents will be able to create their offspring in the image of their choice.

Ours will be the last recognizable, old-fashioned human generation – a human race unchanged since the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago.  Soon genetic engineering and symbiotic interface with the computer will alter this living fossil and render it recognizable only to paleontologists who will look upon it as today’s scientists look at Neanderthals, apes, and dinosaurs.  Slow, progressive Darwinian evolution will be a thing of the past.  Radical, immediate, revolutionary change will be the new algorithm.

Since the human genome was completely sequenced, the identification of specific gene configurations linked to human characteristics and behavior has become routine; and the engineering of some of those sequences to modify or eliminate them has proceeded quickly.  It will not be long before all genetic sequences will have been identified, codified, sorted and catalogued, and available for modification. 

Even more impressively such genetic engineering will be able to replace unwanted genes with more desirable ones. Once that happens, parents will be able to purchase the genes of beautiful, talented, brilliant celebrities and create the infant of their choice.

At the same time, engineers, currently working on a mind-machine interface will soon be able to seamlessly and completely link the human mind with the electronic circuitry of the computer thus creating a purely virtual world in which individuals will be able to instantaneously have access to all the world’s information, images, and experiences; to manipulate them at will,  and to create worlds of their own choosing. 

Artificial Intelligence, now just an important, revolutionary interface with human agents, will soon be completely integrated within the human brain.  Virtuality will not simply change the means of perception; it will define a completely new way of thinking - an unlimited, unimpeded, infinite intellectual and sentient world. 

Genetically engineered human beings, living in a perfectly virtual world where physical reality is meaningless and irrelevant, will be of a new race, a post-human race. Bricks and mortar, flesh and blood, class, identity, and geophysical location will disappear in a new virtual, transformed world.  

All this is undeniable, given the Aladdin's Lamp theory.  However just like those naysayers of times past, the anti-AI lobby is growing.  Vast data centers needed to process information are both consuming enormous, unthinkable amounts of energy and occupying thousands of acres of land. These Cassandras are demanding that the development and extension of these data centers be limited, and that people should stop using AI.

AI consumption in America is already significant with AI systems contributing approximately 2 percent of global energy use.  In 2022 alone, AI systems consumed about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity, roughly equivalent to the total electricity demand of Japan today. The demand is expected to grow with projections indicating that AI could consume more than 1000 terawatt-hours by 2030. 

While data processing per AI use is becoming more efficient, the spectacular overall demand will indeed put never-before seen demands on electricity. 

Now, since the genie is out of the bottle and there is no putting him back, the cries of the naysayers are just fanciful expressions of an environmentalism already moved to the political margins.  Despite decades of fearsome Biblical prophecies about the coming climate Armageddon, nothing like the dire predictions forecast have come true,. Environmentalists have been recast as unhinged streetcorner preachers, and the concept of adaptability - that is given the history of man's accommodation to his environment and remarkable adaptability to it, we will do just fine regardless of what comes our way. 

Head in the sand hopefulness?  Far from it.  If global warming does occur, coastal cities will adapt through extensive wetlands and canals, agriculture will move north, and most importantly livestock, crops, and human beings will all be genetically modified to adapt to the changing climate.  As likely, in an increasingly virtual world, we will be spending more time cybernetically and seamlessly linked with electronic information networks; that is our world will be limitless but not 'real'. 

The telephone would destroy interpersonal communication, talking with neighbors over the back fence.  The automobile would destroy the millennia-old nature-linked pace of life. The computer and the cell phone would isolate people, further eroding polity and communal interaction.  Robotics will destroy jobs and force millions into unemployment, and AI will finish the job. 

All the above is or will be true; but what will replace the old is a mind-expanding universe and the unlocking of human potential never even imagined.  The post-human generation will be so advanced that the old human race will look as antiquated and useless as Henry Ford's Model T's. 

So these demonstrations against building data centers and calls for using old-fashioned, 'energy efficient' search engines seem cute.  As fanciful and naively serious as any of a hundred  protests by progressives who are stuck in a Rousseau-Eugene Victor Debs-Karl Marx utopian vision. 

We will build data centers on earth, in orbit, and on the moon.  We will restore nuclear energy, deploy mini-power stations near AI installation and push forward on nuclear fusion, revolutionary in its own right but critical to serve new power demands. We will not stop using AI. We will make it an indispensable feature of human society. 

Can AI be put to dangerous uses? Of course.  Can recombinant DNA and the personalization of procreation have equally dangerous societal implications? Yes; but will this become an Orwellian nightmare, or just as likely will it be socially adjudicated just like all the technological innovations before?

Protests are natural, predictable, expected expressions of the frustration of people looking for identity in a complex world.  Being against climate change, for the black man, for abortion and gay marriage is an obvious expression of personal need, of camaraderie and solidarity.  Anyone looking at the development of AI could have predicted protests against it.  

Meanwhile the sane and sage, the existential stoics who have studied both the course of history and the human nature that drives it are calm and resolute.  There will always be genies, they will always come out of the bottle never to be put back, and life will go on changed, but essentially no different than before.