The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Climate Anxiety – Niger Coup – LLMs

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus. On this edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard take on three topics in rapid fire to wrap up a busy week of news and events. First up, the Maui fires and images of destruction and chaos. How are these reoccurring events affecting us? Is there a coping strategy for climate-induced anxiety? Next, the coup in Niger sees another African democracy taken over by its military. Do the billions the West is spending on democracy promotion in Africa make any sense? And finally, Large Language Learning models, which have created all the hype around AI this year, seem to be getting more error-prone and unpredictable. Are we starting to see hard limits on the utility of machine learning? To access full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website. in just a few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website.

Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, the executive director of the Monk Debates. Welcome to this, the regular Friday Focus podcast on each and every episode of Friday Focus, we go into the big issues and ideas, shaping the news, informing the public conversation with Janice Gross Stein, founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs and internationally renowned scholar and author. Janice, great to be in discussion with you. What is it today? The 11th of August.

Great to be here. Somebody reminded me of that yesterday and talked about September. I shuddered. Right here. Well, the nights are already, at least here in Southern Ontario, getting a little bit cooler. And I got to say, I kind of like sleeping with my window, open the air conditioning off. But our first topic, Janice, has everything to do with the reason why all of us around the world, it seems, have been running our air conditioners at overtime this summer, which is record sea and land temperatures that have culminated in another episode of what I would call kind of. of climate catastrophe on the island of Maui, a town wiped out, 55 casualties, 55 fatalities and counting.

And what I want to talk to you off the top of the show is about the effects of these images, because they're not just from Maui, they're from Greece, record fires there, there's droughts throughout China. and we're constantly being bombarded by visuals of what seems like a CGI, you know, disaster, epic film, you know, set one would have hoped in some distant future. But now these images, Janice, I just, I don't know, I'm feeling, and I, you see more reporting in the news about this, this kind of induced climate anxiety. And I got to ask you as someone who's thought long and hard about this stuff, you know, is that real?

Should I be experiencing climate anxiety? And if I am, what if anything can I do about this? Those are great questions. So let's start with this. Is this induced? No. Those pictures coming out of Maui, you know, for anybody who's ever read. Cormac McCarthy's The Road, that's it.

This dystopian future is come to life in that burnt-out town and the stories of people jumping into the ocean in order to escape the flames. This is tragically not induced. It's real. And it's happening in different parts of the world. So the really important question is, what can we do about this? And it was very interesting. I went with one of my sons last weekend to visit a friend north of Toronto in so-called cottage country.

And the highway was a parking lot. What should have taken less than two hours before, bumper to bumper cars. Many cars, one person, two-person. And I said to my son last week, you know, We are on fire everywhere this summer and nobody's changing their behavior. And I think that's the crux of it right there, that there, anybody who looks at what is by now good science. Is this science perfect? No, of course not.

Could some of the models be off? But there is such strong scientific evidence now. And then, of course, on top of it, the picture. we're seeing, this involves a massive transformation, very expensive of the things we do in our life. So why do we have a highway? Why don't we all of us have to get on a train or a bus if you want to go run your motorboat all day in the lake? Okay. Yeah, no, I was thinking about that too. In fact, I've been guilty of a little bit of motorboat excess and We just, wow, that is a carbon-intensive pastime.

But before we talk about solutions, let me just try to challenge you a little bit on this because we enjoy debating on the show. There is an extent to which I think these images, which are real, and I don't doubt it, they are selected. They're curated. They fit now into a narrative of climate catastrophization. If I can, I don't know if that's a real word or not, but I'm going to use it. And I get it. I get why, you know, news editors and others pick this stuff because visually it is, wow, it's like dopamine, you know, central or I don't know, maybe cortisone.

It's freaking me out. That leads, Janice, to, I think, a problem, which is with anxiety often comes paralysis, often comes denial. So a lot of the behavior that you identify, as rightly so, kind of contradictory to this year of record temperatures. And I think sea temperatures are especially interesting. And listeners should focus on those because those have big influences on the Gulf Stream and other cooling systems in the earth, which in some ways are much bigger, let's say, than the Amazon rainforest, as important as that is. But all of this Janus just kind of freezes us in place, like dears on the highway. to your cottage.

It's not doing us any favors. And we need to get over the catastrophizing to somehow, I don't know, have some optimism about the future, our optimism to meet this challenge, to adapt to a changing climate, to shrug off the kind of lassitude, the collective lassitude that comes with collective shock. And I think increasingly we're in a condition of collective shock. and it's not helping us personally, collectively address this issue. So there's a contradiction here, Roger, and how we find the right point on this really, really matters.

Okay. You said lassitude, I might say complacency. So what bus through complacency pictures like we saw coming out of Maui? If you spend any time watching those pictures, you think, oh, my God, right? You have to get, so we have to create enough horrified awareness that we have a problem. Have we done that in Canada? No, we still have a chunk of our population. Take the province of Alberta, which just reversed, you know, carbon storage policies,

or is about to reverse carbon storage policies, which is moving against that. That's a problem of complacency and denial, and it's not about me. Maybe it's about my grandchildren, but it's for sure not about me. So part of what we're seeing is designed to break through that.

Now, you're also right that at the other end of the spectrum, if it's so overwhelming, people are powerless. You want to be somewhere, in the middle there. You need to provoke fear in order to get any action. But, Janice, look, to some people, that sounds very sinister. It's like we're going out to socially engineer your behavior by showing you images and curating your news feed to induce a certain response that conforms with our

our a priori assumptions as the proverbial governing elite about how we should. respond to this crisis. It's called social engineering. Yeah. Well, it's not sinister and it's not social engineering because the pictures you and I saw weren't curated by anybody, right? There's no news person in the world that, who was in Hawaii that wasn't going to, if they could get access, send those pictures. It's like saying news photographers who are sending pictures of destroyed towns in Ukraine are part of a, of a government. I mean, no, they're not. But there were millions of other towns around the world that had perfectly safe, happy,

maybe sunny, temperate weather, and we didn't see any pictures of them. I guess what I'm saying is, you know this, Janice, the algorithms, the way mainstream media now has to chase social media. It's all about amping up the dialogue, you know, pushing the images to the max, grabbing attention, right? Attention deficit disorder is the collective disease that afflicts, you know, our postmodern society. But that's too easy, Roger, because that blames what we're seeing, the disproportionate emphasis on bad news. You know, go back 80 years, we had broadsheets.

What did they cover? Murders. There were homicides on the front of the page, right? go look at the Toronto Star 80, 90 years ago. There wasn't a picture of you living your life with your wife and your kids and walking down the block. There was a big headline story for people murdered in midnight shooting. So that's an old, old, old phenomenon. That news media have always gravitated toward dramatic story and dramatic pictures.

And I think the reason I make such a point at this one, it's not engineered. It's not a conspiracy. It's not a lease telling me what to think. That I think takes us in a direction, which is not healthy for anybody. I'm seeing that because it's happening and it's dramatic and it's awful and it's, that's what news has always covered and always told us about. Okay, when we see it, what do we do? I think you're putting your finger on a problem.

governments have to be, this is an elite failure, not elite engineering. This is really the issue. Governments have to be credible in developing strategies to take action. And they have to involve, they have to be able to be believable enough to me that I'm going to make a sacrifice, right? Why should I not sit in that car? I'm not going to do that one again for a whole other reasons. But why would I not sit in the park? car for four hours on a highway.

Unless I if I don't think, well, it doesn't matter because nobody else, nobody else doing anything, where's the leadership from government, both those who are skeptical about climate change, okay, what are you doing about it? What are you doing about? How do you deal

with this? How do you deal with the ocean temperatures? How do you deal with the fact that you go up north and you see glaciers that are melting in front of your eyes? Nobody's making that up Nobody's engineering it. There's no elite that's, you know, operating that glacier with a remote switch. It's happening.

But the real failure is there's not, there's no program to get with. Let me put it that way for people who are concerned rightly so. If you have kids and grandchildren, this is not a world you want to leave to them, frankly. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast to get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program. Simply go to our website, www.w. The monk debates.com. Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site. Make a donation as little as $25 a year of 50 cents an episode and we'll send you not only the full-length editions of each and every Friday Focus podcast, but all kinds of special offers, perks,

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