The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Artificial Intelligence vs Real Ecology | Frankly #49

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

In this Frankly, a follow up to "One Ring to Rule Them All", Nate unpacks the common misconception that AI is the answer to all our energy and ecological problems, specifically climate change. As the development of AI continues to accelerate, many propose that we are entering the 'Exponential Age', yet what's ignored is that we've just lived through an age of exponential impact on Earth's systems. Under this same 'operating system', AI can at best act as a more powerful tool for the continuation of this phenomenon - not to restore ecological stability as some would hope.  If AI is based on current cultural goals and aspirations, who will ultimately benefit and who will pay the costs? What types of solutions is AI capable of developing - and more importantly, where is the interplay of AI and human responsibility required to then implement those ideas to fruition?     To Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/zY29LjWYHIo   For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/49-ai-vs-real-ecology

Good morning. I am up early recording this frankly because I have to drive to the Northwoods in Wisconsin for the annual Hagen's male relative extravaganza and deer camp. I won't be hunting. I'll be hanging out with most of my male relatives and sitting in a stand in the woods and seeing what I see. but it is an institution here in Wisconsin. Most people don't know that in the year 1900, there were a million deer in the United States, and now there's 32 million. They're one of the species that hugely benefited from industrial agriculture and taking down a forest to grow corn and soybeans. So I wanted to get it frankly in the books.

Let me pick up my magic ape ball here and see what they're going to be. the topic is today. Artificial intelligence and climate change. I'm kidding. I don't really have a magic eight ball, but it does seem that there's so many things going on in the world that you could talk about something different every day on risks and craziness going on in society. But today I am going to talk about artificial intelligence and real ecology and how they are at huge odds with each other. So AI is happening incredibly fast. Bill Gates is getting a 20-minute update every single day on how fast AI is progressing. I could probably create these Franklies and podcasts in 20 languages and have the words from my mouth match the languages.

is, we're in a world we can like to a great,

a great, we should we didn't AI. That wasn't

my college remnants of Chinese translating to a great simplification. Chinese listeners out there, be kind to me. But AI

is not my expertise, but how it fits into the systems ecology is something I have quite a strong opinion on. So one of the things that is maybe my biggest asset in the world is I have a large network of friends. And these friends are in different spheres. And I do know people in the climate space who are tech focused and tech savvy and they're good people, and they truly believe that artificial intelligence will solve climate change, partially because it will create new energy technologies that are low carbon,

partially because it will use demand-side management to make our energy use more efficient, and partially because there will be a coordination in how humans use energy. and materials that will be more sustainable. I asked chat GPT4 recently, how could AI solve climate change? And I'll just briefly read what the answers were. Transition to renewable energy, energy efficiency, and there were paragraphs under each of these.

Electrified transportation, sustainable urban planning, carbon pricing, reforestation and conservation, sustainable agriculture, green technology and innovation, international cooperation, adaptation, education and awareness, policy and regulation, investment and infrastructure, sustainable lifestyle choices, economic diversification. Then there was an asterisk addressing climate change and oil resource peaking requires a multifaceted approach and sustained effort. at all levels of society.

Collaboration among governments, businesses, communities, and individuals is crucial to achieving meaningful progress in mitigating these risks. So I'm gonna unpack that a little bit. But I first wanna highlight some big stratospheric gaps that the technologists have in, looking at climate change and our future trajectory.

The first has to do with energy blindness. Here's a quote from a guy named Mark Andresen, who is Silicon Valley billionaire, a large proponent of artificial intelligence. We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. On that, I agree with them. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone's lives can be.

We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000 times, then raise everyone else's energy 1,000 times as well. What? This is so unbelievably energy blind. So what he's talking about is the United States uses 50s. Five times the world average, give or take. So a five-fold increase to bring everyone up to us, then a thousand-fold increase for everyone. And notice he said that we would increase ours a thousand times first and then bring everyone

else up, which I thought was an odd wording. Five thousand times increase in energy. Here's an interesting fact. So there is a heat dissipating effect when we burn energy. The focus now is on climate change. because there's a thermal blanket over the earth that we are trapping heat from CO2. The heat, dissipating heat from burning energy is only around four or five percent right now of the CO2 warming impact.

But at a 5,000 time increase in energy, even if it was all completely low carbon, the heat from that energy would raise the global. temperature 40 degrees Fahrenheit to roughly human body temperature. If we went to 7,000 times, which would be not too much longer in Mr. Andresen's terms, we would boil the oceans. The waste heat impact on Earth would be that much. This is just catastrophically energy blind. And I have a chip in my shoulder with this because I have a master's in finance. I know a lot of people working on Wall Street and in tech, they're well-intentioned. They're just absolutely clueless of the physics, the energy, and the ecology of our situation. So that's one point. Another is that we don't live

in a static system. Watchers of this show know that I'm concerned about what I call the four-horsmen of the 2020s. Number one is the departure of our financial claims in reality versus is our underlying reality. Number two is geopolitics, nuclear war, and the game theoretical change as we head towards scarcity. Number three is the complexity and the supply chains. And number four is the social contract. So in the best case, AI could boost our productivity in combination with blockchain or other things. And in the past, our productivity has largely come from the carbon pulse powering the machines. And of course, our stories say that it's the machines and human ingenuity that have brought us to this point. But we kind of neglect the fact that energy has been

increasing every single year. So even if productivity is able to be increased by artificial intelligence, we still have these other risks that are present. And for instance, AI proponents think that we will accelerate development of nuclear fission and also crack the code of nuclear fusion. But even if nuclear fusion were figured out right today in November of 2023, we would need 20 years of safety testing and implementation and rolling it out and changes. So timing and given the four horsemen is also a big risk. But even if the productivity were able to increase, this leads to another blindness, which is ecology blind.

That AI isn't ecology blind. AI is just a tool. But the purveyors and users of AI within the system are completely ecology blind. We hear often in the news, especially in the financial news, that artificial intelligence and blockchain will lead us to an exponential age. From an ecology perspective, we have just lived through an exponential age in a negative way. This didn't happen recently. You might not know this quote, but I'm going to read it.

We live in a zoologically impoverished world from a. which all the hugest and fiercest and strangest forms have recently disappeared. And it is no doubt a much better world for us now that they have gone. Yet it is a marvelous fact and one that has not been sufficiently dwelt upon, this sudden dying out of so many large mammalia, not in one place, but in half the land surface of the globe. This quote is not from 2017. This is from Alfred Russell Wall us over 150, almost 150 years ago, 1876. And since then, things have gotten much, much worse.

Of the 8 million species on Earth, one million are currently classified at a risk of extinction. We've lost, on average, 70% of the populations of animals, insects, birds, and fish since the year 1970. Our extinctions are 10,000 times the background rate. We've had things like 98% of elephants populations are gone. Many, many other individual statistics like that. 33% of marine mammals are threatened with extinction. Insects are declining at 1 to 2% a year.

So if AI can solve climate change, that itself is systems blind because we have many other planetary boundaries like microplastics, endocrine disruptors, organic pollutants. By the way, endocrine disruptors next week is Jeremy Grantham will be on the show, talking about how one couple in seven can no longer reproduce. And this is because of endocrine disruptors. And 20, 30 years ago, it was zero in seven. And this is accelerating. We have genetically modified organisms.

threatening biosphere integrity. On the climate side, it's not just the temperatures, but the impact on ecosystems. Two days ago, it was 108 degrees in Brazil in spring. And the humidity made it like 130-something. What is happening to the Amazon forest, which is one of the lungs of the planet, which is now from a carbon standpoint,

turning into a source of carbon, and not a sink, and this is also happening in the northern boreal forests, to think that AI can solve these things while growing the economy is paramount of ecology blindness. So this leads to, you know, a core problem I have with the artificial intelligence narrative, which is we're continuing to grow the entire system while tweaking it on the side. Since 1990, we have gotten massively energy efficient. We've increased our energy efficiency by over 30% globally. And yet, we've grown our total energy by 60 some percent.

So where is it in AI that is a subset of the market that we're going to reduce our energy use, reduce our impact on nature? So I asked ChatGPT, a follow-up question, is there any example of humans collaborating at a global level to actually solve climate change? The response was the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015 is one notable example of international efforts to address climate change. The agreement brought together countries from around the world with the goal of limiting global temperature increase to well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Well, how's that working out?

Yesterday, I saw a stat that since the Paris Accord, global society has increased new coal capacity over 200 gigawatts. Temperatures continue to increase. Emissions continue to increase. Energy use continues to increase. To plan on AI solving this is like dousing a forest fire with gasoline and a little math. So AI we have to recognize is a tool. One of the best quotes from Dennis Meadows on a podcast from last year is he said technology is a tool. And if someone's coming at you with a screwdriver and they switch it to a hammer, they're still coming at you.

Artificial intelligence is like coming at you with a magic flaming sword in one of those video games. You're going to be able to slay monsters and find more treasure. faster, but the objective of the game hasn't changed. So artificial intelligence, uh, is in service of the superorganism. And just like shale technology was to oil production of getting a larger straw and didn't really increase the amount of estimated ultimate recovery, but what it did is it had a wider straw and allowed us to get the oil out faster. I fear that artificial intelligence with an absence of wisdom and new governance and structures is going to act like a larger straw on the earth and on our ecology.

It's like giving an alcoholic methamphetamines. So I am not anti-technology. I actually think that AI, with all the wonderful, amazing things that it could do like new medicines and new ways of discovering things and education. And it boggles the mind what's possible. It could be the perfect tool that humanity needs right now, but it's lower on the threshold of the choreography of power. And maybe there's a thousand or maybe even a hundred AIs are going to control the world.

And many of them are controlled by military or billionaires. and they are not in service of humanity or sustainability or ecology or the future. They are in service of the Mordor economy, of Soron, of unmitigated power and growth. So how can we use our tools towards a new aspirations, cultural values, governance, civic responsibility, purpose at this 11th hour of humanity on this planet, towards better outcomes, we seriously need to have that conversation. Because right now, AI is just going to make our situation worse because it's in service to the Mollock dynamic that is the beating heart of our economic system.

I have a lot more to say, but it's 7.30 in the morning and I have to leave to go see my parents. I hope this made sense more soon.