The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was primarily a climate change mitigation bill, allocating $370 billion over a decade to transform our economy into a new clean energy paradigm. The bill was intended to promote a range of clean industries, with a focus on well-paid union jobs. At the time, it was considered the largest investment in solving climate change in US history. Even if I thought it was woefully inadequate, it was still the most we had ever done, and more importantly, it was spurring other nations to do the same. We were on track to enter a time of cooperation, with a sense of collective purpose, that would both create a more equitable economy as well as heal the planet. It was the beginning of the kind of global cooperation that Carl Sagan identified as a potential roadblock to solving climate change forty years ago in a US Senate hearing. To him, global cooperation was something we had never achieved, but if we could view the health of our environment as a shared responsibility, then maybe we could change that and usher in a new era of peace and prosperity.
My, what a new day can bring.
Well, under Trump, the IRA has mostly been gutted. Much of the money is being redirected, and most clean energy initiatives have been squashed. And now, thanks to Silicon Valley, the world is on track to instead invest trillions of dollars into unneeded, and energy-intensive, AI development over the next five years alone. Triggering the world into a competitive arms race to develop the most environmentally destructive technology mankind has ever devised, all while shattering the notion of global cooperation. Hey, Think Different, huh?
Which just happens to be really bad timing, because in 2022, there was still an inkling of a chance to stay below the 1.5 °C as defined in the Paris agreement. But last year, we blew past that number for the first time, and we’ll now likely land well above 2°C by 2050. The predicted outcomes of that are well documented. Beyond costing trillions in damage, they will also cause global mass migrations, including within the United States, as people flee the coasts and the water-dependent cities in the West.
But good news, according to Silicon Valley, all we have to do is create AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and get this, because this is really great. So, according to Silicon Valley, if we can just create AGI, it’s gonna solve climate change for us. We can’t figure it out, even though we already basically know what to do, so instead, AGI will figure it out. For real, that’s their line. Hilarious, ain’t it? If we all weren’t falling for it, it might have even been funny.
So instead of mitigating climate change in a paradigm of global cooperation, we are now in a global competition to invest in data centers that will require two to four times the amount of energy they consume today. Sam Altman openly admits that most of that energy will come from the burning of fossil fuels. And as outlined in ‘Empire of AI’ by Karen Hao, tech companies are acting as modern-day imperialists. Building data centers in water-scarce areas in the third world, exploiting cheap labor to clean toxic data that large language models require and disregarding local environmental laws. The name Empire of AI is succinct, as the book rightly equates modern corporate exploitation to the same colonialist mindset that conquered much of the globe. And now it’s a system that is threatening to usurp democratic governments around the world, maybe most visibly in the United States, with Elon Musk investing $300 million into the Trump presidency and Silicon Valley chomping at the bit to integrate it’s technology into all of our social programs and military systems, all while they are developing algorithms that keep the population misinformed and distracted.
And now, they are using the rallying cry of AGI to convince the same western governments that they are actively undermining, that they should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want, as a matter of saving the world from dangerous AI models, like the ones they are developing, from getting into the wrong hands. Their hands are fine, though; they got good hands. So obviously it’s a ruse, surrounded by a smokescreen inside of a house of mirrors. The reality is that we already have small-scale, non-energy-intensive versions of what we might call AI that can be deployed to actually solve real problems. You know, like climate change. The only problem is that those don’t make enough money for the capitalists. So the talent needed to develop these versions are being hoovered up and monopolized by Silicon Valley. So instead of responsibly developing the kind of solutions the world actually needs, instead, Sam Altman and Zuckerberg, and all the rest are racing to develop a massive, and in their minds, commercially viable set of tools that will make them unbelievably rich. And it’s that greed and hubris that blinds them from fully appreciating that what they are setting out to do will destroy the environment, put millions of people out of work, and plunge the world into a cutthroat authoritarian marketplace bent on competition instead of ushering in the cooperation the world so desperately needs right now.
Sound bleak? Well, it should, because it is. Am I being over the top? Sure, why not, aren’t they? As they endlessly paint their bullshit utopian vision of exponential economic growth? So what’s the solution? We’re always supposed to have solutions; we can’t just point out problems, even though recognizing and defining problems are the starting point to identifying solutions. Just like what Carl Sagan did four decades ago when identifying the problem of global cooperation to a Senate committee on climate change led by Al Gore. Yep, that’s right, we’ve known about this for a very long time. Well, anyway, I do have a solution. It will be impossible to achieve in today’s world, but it’s worth saying. And it’s gonna sound so dramatic that I’ll start a new paragraph with it.
Nationalize Silicon Valley.
Hell, I’ll leave it as a standalone paragraph. Yes, nationalize Silicon Valley. Break up Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the rest like we did so many other monopolies. Take AI development back into government hands, believe me, the researchers and developers will follow. And then regulate it the way we regulated nukes by developing an international framework. Start scaling up the less energy-intensive AI to help us tackle climate change—you know, our real problem—and then we can start solving the problem of global wealth distribution. Because, apparently, being super rich is making people crazy.
How’s that for an idea? Or we can let Sam Altman do whatever the hell he wants while we doom scroll as the world burns—until the electricity goes out.