July 2026
Long, long ago, when people lived in caves, a young fellow rushed into a cave and announced, “I have discovered a grove of trees laden with sweet juicy fruit, but there is a catch. To get to the grove you must go through a field frequented by a hungry lion..”
The exited young folks who rushed outside and ran off to the fruit grove, are not our ancestors.
The pundits are in general agreement that AI will transform society beyond recognition. In the olden days, when many of us lived in caves, such existential issues were delt with by a council of wise elders, whose wisdom was passed down from generation to generation. Unfortunately, the vast majority of societies that followed this sensible practice have been systematically exterminated by those with a craving for sweet, juicy nectar.
There are so many assumptions about AI that go unquestioned.
The pundits are in general agreement that AI will increase productivity. We assume that an increase in productivity can only be a good thing. We can produce the same amount of stuff with a smaller workforce because AI has increased efficiency. But history has shown us that when business increases efficiency, it just makes more stuff, and more stuff means more emissions and more depletion of resources. The world already has far too much stuff, we are churning it out then chucking it away at an ever increasing rate. If, on the other hand, AI was used to produce the same amount of goods with less workers, those workers would then be forced to find a completely new form of employment in a brand new industry. This would also lead to increased emissions and depletion of resources.
We already have an existential crisis on our hands – the climate crisis. We do not have a council of wise elders with the authority to deal with that crisis, we have politicians who are unable to agree on how seriously to take the situation. Our society has been aware of this existential crisis for nearly forty years now, and we have shown that we are utterly incapable of collectively taking the measures necessary to fix it. Maybe we have met our match, we have found the limit of human intelligence. Maybe we have come across a problem so difficult that even we cannot fix it.
Naturally, some people hope that AI will help us fix it, but I wouldn’t bet on it ,because the problem is largely a psychological problem and AI does not have feelings so it cannot grasp psychological problems. Of course AI can find all sorts of wonderful technological solutions to the climate crisis, but we already have those solutions at our finger tips, we just lack the will to deploy them, and we do not have a council of wise elders with the authority to make us deploy them. What we do have is a global economy that dominates 99% of the world’s population. Every nation on earth is inextricably intertwined with that matrix. Every nation is beholden to the demands of the global economy for their sustenance. No nation can decide to take a pause in the relentless pursuit of economic growth in order to devote its resources to tackling the climate crisis., simply because that government would be turfed out of office by voters who demand an affluent life style at all costs, and that is a psychological problem above all else. If you can convince the richest people in the world, as they are the biggest polluters, that it is in their best interests to take a break in their quest for astronomical wealth, for the sake of a safe climate for their descendants, only then can we begin to tackle the greatest force holding us back, inertia!
Ben Boyang
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