2022 has to be the year when the fantasies that are pedalled by the rich white boys with their penis rockets and social media social inadequacies are quashed. These fake fantasy futures are – ironically – helping to ensure a failed future for humanity.
Climate crisis Cassandras are unpopular – I get
that. Like being told to eat your veg when you are a child and brush your
teeth. But then no one wants cancer and no one wants fillings or root canal
work. You can’t have it both ways.
However, what the ‘doomsayers’ have been trying to explain for decades - is that we are not so much decimating the planet when we hack away at essential eco systems and pollute with unfettered consumerism – we are MAKING THE PLANET UNINHABITABLE FOR HUMANS. That is us.
There is a huge overlap
between the realists and the selfish people. There is common ground.
Is the message that difficult to grasp?
Clearly, yes.
It’s far easier to listen to those who say
technology is going to solve all our problems.
I listened – for as long as I could – the 2021 Reith Lecture on AI doing ‘human’ jobs. There was some smug nonsense about a robot folding towels and at one point, as a side issue, the eminent lecturer briefly mentioned the price of all the necessary raw materials being affordable in his AI future - ‘because it would be’ !!!! Listen for yourself. AI utopia
Never mind a human desert – there seemed to be an
intellectual desert on Radio 4.
And this is where the nonsense of a tech-resolved
human future always falls down. It is so easy to forget that even hi tech –
sci-fi tech - RELIES ON ACTUAL REAL RESOURCES.
Remember, the technology to make your smartphone is far more advanced and uses tech they didn’t even have to get the first rocket to the moon. And that was just one rocket to one moon.
Space is filling up with human debris (making space exploration more dangerous, ironically and with more chance of damage to satellites) just as the sea and land is smothered with poisonous plastics, killing and suffocating the things we actually need to live. Oxygen. Unpolluted food. Clean Water.
That ubiquitous smartphone – the one
that tells you if your over-heated home full of crap you don't use is being burgled or whether you have
milk in the fridge (!) - needs regular charging. It will only work if there is –
not just electricity - but the infrastructure to provide it to you whenever/wherever you
want it. And uninterrupted satellite connections.
2022 needs to the year we wake up.
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Usually I ask you to check out my books (and some of
you have – thank you) but this week – just try Zero One Zero Two The e-version is very cheap and it’s a novella so even if your concentration
span has shrunk to a social media-induced 3 minute absolute limit – you could
get the hang of it. Hey – just skim read. You can do that.