The richest man in the world is an idiot. Actually, he’s turned out to be a sociopath who treats women like chattel and doesn’t like democracy. But he’s also an idiot. Which makes sense, because contrary to what they like to tell you, being super-rich often has very little to do with being intelligent and more to do with not caring about the common good, or future generations for that matter. We’ll get back to that point later. So, case in point, Elon Musk’s tweet from back in September.
“Climate change definitely will not end the world as we know it! If people keep pushing hard, humanity will solve the sustainable energy problem in time.”
— Elon Musk, loosely betting on the future of mankind.
So we hear this a lot, right? If only we can figure out how to produce cheap clean electricity then everything will be right in the world and we can keep chugging diet cokes all day and recycle the bottles into park benches or flotation devices for polar bears or some such nonsense. Well, I’m here to say that’s not how it’s going to work. For one, there is no clean energy without drastically reducing consumption. For two, cheap for who? Energy will never be cheap for consumers in a society dominated by industrialists. In other words, we’re never going to innovate our way out of climate change without first changing our collective worldview.
In Star Trek, for example, everyone likes to think they created a futuristic utopian society because their technologists led the way. That’s not how it worked, they first had to envision a world without scarcity, without that, all technology led to exploitation. Because, simply put, our innovations will always reflect our values. As Kirk made clear in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Lol, I’m not doing that. In the universe envisioned by Roddenberry humans stopped using money and stopped engaging in capitalism. Quite a feat for a franchise that sells lunchboxes. But the point is that we’re never going to innovate our way out of global disaster with the mindset that everything is a commodity. And what that boils down to is the concept that humans have a divine right of dominion over the planet. Or the folly that we are not interconnected to the fabric of the universe but somehow live outside of the laws of nature.
That’s the mindset that has brought us to the brink of destruction. It will never be the mindset that innovates our way out of this. I’m not saying we can’t innovate our way out of this mess, I’m just saying that mindset will never be the worldview that helps us make the right choices.
“The law says if you poison the water, you’ll die. The law says that if you poison the air, you’ll suffer. The law says if you degrade where you live, you’ll suffer. … If you don’t learn that, you can only suffer. There’s no discussion with this law.”
— Oren Lyons, on the laws of nature.
Guys like Elon Musk can’t wrap their heads around ideas like the above quote from Oren Lyons. They have the hubris to believe that they can not only bypass the laws of nature but that they can even bend the laws of nature to their will. Here are some examples of what our super-intelligent and apparently steroid-induced industrialists are talking about these days.
We need to get to Mars because if we don’t become an interplanetary species then the human race will eventually die off and the light of consciousness will be lost forever.
This generation will likely be the last to be fully human, for humanity to survive we will probably become some sort of human/machine hybrid.
The former is obviously Musk, but not him alone. The latter is something that most people are starting to take for granted. But here’s the rub. First of all, we can’t survive in space. We’ve been studying it for decades. Maybe we’ll find a way but the obstacles are extremely difficult to overcome. Not only the obvious that we’d freeze and suffocate, but more so that being in zero gravity wreaks havoc on our bodies in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. We’ve only been able to study the effects of being in zero gravity for the past 50 years and have only just begun to scratch the surface of what it will take to create an environment in space that we can survive in. When we do, my guess is that it will probably look a lot like Earth, which is, as a matter of fact, already in space.
Okay, now on to the prospect of merging our bodies with technology. We like that idea, how fun. We have all these science fiction fantasies of putting our consciousness in some sort of supercomputer connected to a protein shake and 200 pounds of impossible burger. Or more likely, in the short term, implanting chips that let us control our TVs. That sounds nice. I’m not going to discredit what potential this technology has for people with disabilities. What it can do for mobility, sight, hearing, all kinds of things. But this once again goes back to what our values are. Why are we developing this stuff in the first place? To change the channel easier and doom scroll in our mind’s eye? Or to cure blindness? Sure, you can say both, but which one will make more money is what the industrialists are asking themselves.
Most likely we’ll never be able to port our consciousness to some device and remain to be anything like what we would consider to be human. For one, just try to define consciousness, or human for that matter. But also consider this, we are the result of billions of years of evolution. That means that our bodies, our consciousness, our whole being is hardwired to exist here, in this ecosystem. What we consider to be our ‘self’ doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s intertwined with our physical self and with the environment we’ve spent billions of years coevolving with. The same reason we can’t exist in space is the same reason why we have no idea what augmenting ourselves with technology will do to our consciousness. Just like we didn’t know what would happen to our bodies in space until we started studying it. I’m not talking about avoiding using technology for beneficial health outcomes, that’s of course something we need to explore. I’m talking about the ideas floating around such as the next generation of humans will be tech hybrids augmented by artificial intelligence or Musk’s idea of putting a chip in everybody. These guys have no idea what they’re playing with and they treat it as though humanity is just another piece of technology that can be tinkered with to see what happens. I mean seriously, are they fricking space lizards? What is wrong with them? And that brings us back to the notion that somehow we live outside of the laws of nature. Let’s just clear this up real quick, we don’t.
Many indigenous cultures of North America have always had the concept of everything being related. The term is often expressed as ‘all of my relations’, in Lakota it’s Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, in Mohawk it’s Akwe Nia’Tetewá:neren, it means that everything is connected. The Earth, the animals (of which we are one), the plants, the universe, it’s all connected and it all deserves respect because everything is interdependent. The Western mindset likes to call these kinds of ideas primitive. But are they? Are we better off realizing that we are indeed interconnected to everything that we have coevolved with for billions of years or are we better off thinking that we have dominion over the planet and that we can somehow exist in a vacuum? That we can just extract whatever we want without consequence? Or that we can take the reins of evolution and manufacture our own evolutionary leap? Which is what Musk, and many of these people, have been talking about. And I’m sorry, that’s insane. Here’s some free advice: Don’t follow crazy people into the abyss.
Deciding which of these worldviews should inform our values will define the kind of technology we create. The path of adopting the mindset of all my relations does not necessarily mean that we abandon technology, it just means we infuse our inventions with this philosophy, one that takes everyone and everything into account. Who knows maybe that’s what will bring us to the stars someday, as Roddenberry had imagined. I said someday because for now, we have much higher priorities to worry about. If you haven’t noticed the world is burning, and in my opinion, to continue on the path of mankind thinking it has some divine right of dominion over the planet, that we can defy the laws of nature, is an evolutionary dead-end.
Which brings me back to the future generations. The other concept that ran through many North American indigenous societies is that of the Seven Generations. There are a few versions of this but the gist is that every generation should be informed by the previous three generations and must make decisions based on what they think would be best for the next three generations. It’s a philosophy that goes hand in hand with the worldview of all of my relations. Not only is everything connected but we are also collectively connected to our past and responsible for our collective future. We would greatly benefit from this kind of thinking, especially now that we’re seeing the consequence of not understanding how interconnected everything is.