“This isn’t sustainable, but sustainability was never the goal. The goal was maximizing efficiency and minimizing labor costs, and by that measure, the system works perfectly” Mona Lazar.
Through this blog have been sounding the alarm for over 8 years now. Maybe it’s time for some proverbial standing on a soap box on Hyde Park corner ranting about some ass (arse) kicking realities. As I read about what is happening in a plethora of disciplines that affect our ability to live in a sustainable world, I am bemused at the complacency of a humanity allowing take-over of their lives to systems that do not have the planets or humanities best interests at heart.
I have said this often, and in a recent blog I contribute to, tried to make it clear why much of what education for sustainability fails to realize (or accept?) is that the globalized systems running our lives cannot makes the changes we need. “What stops us cold is persisting in the belief that somehow the powers-that-be, which control the current global systems, will change it all for us. I conclude that they will not, or cannot, adapt to the necessary socio-cultural changes needed to build a world that lives sustainably. The current set of beliefs and values inherent within a worldview of hedonistic-materialism is completely incompatible with a worldview required for a sustainable future” Jurin.
The fatal mindset of profit at all costs is so entrenched in our economic thinking that we are like the lemmings I mentioned in my last post. I look at economic and social trends, and what looks absolutely obvious to me seems oblivious to most others. I literally do feel like a latter-day John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness. Unlike the Casandra of Greek myth, I don’t think it is that people do not believe me, but that they are transfixed by the lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. What used to be called the ‘American Dream of successful living’ is now the modern nightmare for the whole planet.
I recently read that the median income for most western developed countries is rising. Really?? If you look at your income versus outcome, you will see how costs have risen but your paycheck hasn’t anywhere near as much (if you are lucky enough to get a regular paycheck). The kicker is that the original line about median income really has risen. Only it is because in real terms, the rest of us get poorer by the day while the uber rich are getting exponentially more. Our apparent wealth is all illusionary. I talk about this in an earlier post.
One of the biggest disruptions in modern history is ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’. Since 2022 we have been caught up in a frenzy of implementing (AI). We have been using AI for well over a decade in our social media algorithms’ but what is happening now would make Alan Turing cringe (see link). Whether AI has actually passed the Turing test is still debatable. I personally don’t think that AI is anywhere near being conscious of itself, but I do see that its capacity to out-think us is already here. Currently AI is ‘programmed’ to be ‘efficient’ in whatever task it is given. So, if its efficiency is based on economic managerial effectiveness based on a profit only model, then it will do its work with brutal and cold brilliance. AI has no moral compass.
And as blogger Daniel Pinchbeck recently states: “Just in the last few months, the development of Artificial Intelligence has reached a new stage. We appear to be at an inflection point for humanity and for the immediate future of post-industrial civilization. Perhaps this sounds hyperbolic, but I do not think it is. People throughout the AI industry are calling the release of GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 (as well as Claude Code and Cowork) as harbingers of a massive shift: AI is on the verge of becoming self-recursively self-improving. This means it may quickly accelerate beyond human capacity not in a single domain like chess or mathematics, but in all domains at once.” (see link for full blog post).
I hear daily how many people are laid-off as AI takes over more and more white-collar jobs. As Pinchbeck also states: “Many have forecast a scenario where the economy bifurcates violently, with a tiny cohort of founders and tech leaders who become stratospherically wealthy, alongside a small layer of early adopters who manage to secure the last remaining positions. Below this elite tier, everybody else is left without much to do or hope for. The danger is not just that new jobs won’t be created, but that the mechanisms for wealth distribution will fundamentally break down. Harris notes that a world where a single founder can run a billion-dollar company with barely any employees outside of AI agents is “totally untenable” without a radical redesign of the economic system. (But then you also have to ask who will be buying the products from that billion-dollar company if there is no consumer base).”
You will have noticed how everything is now AI based from booking a reservation to setting up appointments, and even managing records and procedures, etc. It was once said err is human, but it takes a computer to make a real mess. I would now add that it takes AI to royally fuck it all up. I read of a large corporation recently that implemented an AI managerial system that would improve their economic benefits by over 50%. Of course, that meant that AI was talking the jobs of over half of the existing staff. What happens, as often happens, is that the AI wasn’t fully programmed to understand the nuances of the corporation, just the processes. As glitches in the programming became apparent, all the redundant staff had to be retained to keep doing their jobs as the AI was properly trained to replace them. This is similar as the manufacturing drains of globalization where industries in developed countries trained their new counterparts in developing countries where labor was radically cheaper. Only this time, AI, once in place, unlike actual workers, does need to be actually paid.
I listened to one business person I know say that this is simply progress, just as large scale manufacturing in the Industrial Revolution was progress over the agrarian system and that people learned new kinds of jobs. No, no no! This time there are no other kinds of jobs, except possibly physical jobs requiring some physical dexterity, and even then, robotic systems will be buildable and programmable with AI management. NO, what is coming is even more insidious. Our global overlords have even more control of our lives. Last week the European Union finalized mandatory digital identity wallet requirements. Yes, it’s all about efficiency, but with everything about you, from medical records to finances, now stored in the cloud and managed by AI, an Orwellian future becomes every closer a reality. And it’s all happening at warp speed with no accountability. And you were never consulted or asked if you wanted this. And I’m not even talking about the push for transhumanism.
No one is regulating AI or the systems being built and how they are used. Transparency is all but non-existent. Investments in AI companies are going through the roof. Memory of previous investment booms like the dot.com bubble should be high in our minds, but profits are soaring and as blogger Umair Hague says, “As long as the stock market booms, [people] will look the other way. They’ll quietly avert their eyes, to the immense, catastrophic damage being done to their democracy, society, and futures…. The bubble will burst. It feels like a big bubble about to burst. It may come with the fall of over investment in AI and techno optimism. It may come from over reliance on increasing prices which leads people to buy less. It may come from our denial of climate catastrophes and their ripple effects: famine, heat, labor costs, the geopolitical conflicts, or the growing impacts of people, planet, and animals migrating.”
Let’s just stick with basic AI for now. Besides the massive loss of jobs, the lack of intellectual oversight, and the lack of emotional and moral ability of AI except to fulfil its programming, the ecological effects of AI are also enormous. AI isn’t in some amorphous and inert cloud. AI sits in massive servers all over the planet and those server centers are one ecological catastrophe waiting to happen. Shades of the Matrix waiting in the wings.
Data centers, of which there are many everywhere, take enormous amounts of energy to run, and these centers are growing exponentially. For instance, I read recently that training GPT-4 required over 50 GWh of electricity, enough to power the city of San Francisco for three days. With all that electrical activity, the server systems have to be constantly cooled. It has been measured that a single ChatGPT enquiry causes enough heat generation in the server of around a third of a milliliter of water. Sounds trivial until you scale that up to AI enquiries every day. Consider that a server in an arid location (where most servers tend to be located) might require trillions of liters of water a year at the expense of human habitation. Yes, that water can be recycled but humans come second.
And all that extra energy merely increases energy use exponentially, and again with the servers getting priority over human needs. It is estimated that AI server needs will exceed human needs as AI grows exponentially. All the E-waste is another problem. If you thought that cellphones are a problem, the maintenance, upkeep, repair and building of more AI systems (minerals and electronic waste) will only get worse not better. There is research into reducing AI demands – like photonic computing and analog in-memory computing – and improved renewable energy systems will help. But, if we are currently experiencing electrical shortages, imagine what the demands will be once more advanced AI systems get imposed upon us.
We are coming into a future now where a worldview based on profit only drives society with AI taking the unemotional and amoral lead, or we make a decision to build our own lives around a sustainability worldview. Sitting on the fence is a tacit acceptance of the former. I’ll step off my soapbox for today.
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