TWIN Hurricanes?? This is not the planet I was born on.
TWIN Hurricanes?? This is not the planet I was born on.
Reflections on wild weather & A.I.
Reflecting on the devastation of back-to-back hurricanes, I realize I am raising my two-year-old daughter on a different planet than the one I was born on.
And I am raising her in a different civilization than the one I was born into.
I am not talking about science fiction; I am sharing a scientific fact. I am not detailing the premise of a futuristic novel. I am describing our present-day social reality—as it is unfolding right now.
On MY home planet, there was never a year when Texas froze over while the North Pole blazed hotter than the Sahara desert. The oceans were sometimes warm—but they never got as hot as saunas.
But in June 2021, the year before my daughter was born, temperatures in the Arctic reached 100 degrees. (The average temperature in the Sahara desert is 86 degrees.)
A few months earlier, a February blizzard dropped Texas temperatures to -2 degrees—icing over the state and killing 246 people.
In summer 2023, the ocean waters off the coast of Florida reached a record-breaking 100 degrees. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission warns against hot tubs getting much warmer than that.
This is not the planet I was born on. But it is the one she will grow up on.
As for the civilization she is growing up in:
Her first crush probably won’t be a dashing cartoon character or distant pop star. Her first crush will almost certainly be an A.I.—a complex, persistent, digital personality whom she can interact with whenever she wants.
When the time comes for her to have kids, she might pull out her laptop and design them using widely available biotech tools.
And she might be buried in 80 or 90 years—on Mars.
In the civilization I grew up in, all of these ideas would have been fantastical. But what used to be a crazy fantasy is the only reality my daughter will ever know. My fear is that this “new human civilization” will not be very human—OR very civilized. As I contemplate her future, my dreams are haunted by movies like Mad Max and The Matrix.
As I watch her sleep, I ask myself: what responsibilities do I have to her—a baby girl born into this suddenly strange new century? What do living generations owe her—and all of our yet-unborn children and grandchildren? The old, dying civilization continues to wheeze and belch out megatons of planet-baking pollution. Meanwhile, the High Technologists are laying the groundwork for some Brave New World—but one with threats and opportunities that even they cannot accurately predict or foretell.
Will the future consist of killer robots hunting cowering humans on a ruined planet? Or will the next society exceed our wildest dreams in terms of peace and prosperity? Are we headed for the nightmare of war and Frankenstein tech portrayed in The Terminator—or the dream of human cooperation and scientific advancement portrayed in Star Trek?
Will the future consist of killer robots hunting cowering humans on a ruined planet? Or will the next society exceed our wildest dreams in terms of peace and prosperity?
No one knows for sure. But one thing is inarguable: none of our existing institutions were built to help humanity leap into a future this alien. Labor unions, political parties, cable news shows, super PACS—none of these entities are “fit for the function” of helping our species survive and thrive in this new world. They were invented in another century for another purpose – on another planet.
Therefore, our living generations must invent new institutions – just as our forebears were forced to. We must create novel ways of bringing people together to shield living systems and advance the common good. As we forge these new associations and enterprises, our collective efforts will yield something profound: the first human society co-created by biological intelligence and non-biological (artificial) intelligence. Without always realizing it, we will be acting as co-founders of a new civilization. This is a sacred task—one of massive, enduring consequences for every subsequent generation on this planet and beyond.
Unfortunately, we may be off to a poor start. Many tech companies and investors are rushing headlong simply to cash in—downplaying the dangers, showing little care for the people who might be left out, and betraying little concern for the places that might be left behind. In their battle to gain supremacy over each other, the High Technologists are assembling the technological machinery that could plunge the world into a high-tech Nightmare.
To give humanity (and our homeworld) a better chance, we need to build machinery that is designed to propel us toward a technology-enabled Dream.
If you want to help me do that, join the movement at DreamMachine.Org.
What a riveting read, Van! Wow. This has the makings of an entire book. I hope you write it. Your vision is invaluable.
Welcome to Substack, where I get to talk to your heroic self and I also get to talk to others of our ilk who were not to be found here 20 months ago when I left Constant Contact to find activists I thought were here. Now, there are sharp analyzers about the danger we are in who have signed on, but they all think it's too late to avoid apocalypse - so I still can’t find people on my wavelength for what we-the-people could do to end run around government, that serves economic interests and not human well-being.
Even though odds are we won’t avert major misery I keep looking, knowing that humanity en masse is incredibly smart. However, be aware that nowhere on Substack or anywhere else is there anybody writing about anything to do other than vote Democratic. I have $100 on offer to direct me to anyone or anything that is scheming about how to turn us from self-interest where money runs our show to caring about each other as much as we care about ourselves where we would create a world that works for us. It hasn’t cost me anything.
This week I’ve gone from putting out suggestions for what we could do to “let’s do this”: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/lets-do-something-already-to-turn. I hope you’ll subscribe to NOW WHAT? – all free – to think with me about the road ahead .