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The Church of Technology

Should anything save us, it will be technology. But you need more than tautologies to save the planet, and, especially within the futurist fraternity of Silicon Valley, technologists have little more than fairy tales to offer. Over the last decade, consumer adoration has anointed those founders and venture capitalists something like shamans, Ouija-boarding their way toward blueprints for the world’s future. But conspicuously few of them seem meaningfully concerned about climate change. Instead, they make parsimonious investments in green energy (Bill Gates aside) and fewer still philanthropic payouts (Bill Gates again aside), and often express the perspective, outlined by Eric Schmidt, that climate change has already been solved, in the sense that a solution has been made inevitable by the speed of technological change—or even by the introduction of a particular self-advancing technology, namely machine intelligence, or AI.

Blind faith is one way of describing this worldview, though many in Silicon Valley regard machine intelligence with blind terror. Another way of looking at it is that the world’s futurists have come to regard technology as a superstructure within which all other problems, and their solutions, are contained. From that perspective, the only threat to technology must come from technology, which is perhaps why so many in Silicon Valley seem less concerned with runaway climate change than they are with runaway artificial intelligence: the only fearsome power they are likely to take seriously is the one they themselves have unleashed. It is a strange evolutionary stage for a worldview midwifed into being, in the permanent counterculture of the Bay Area, by Stewart Brand’s nature-hacking bible, Whole Earth Catalog. And it may help explain why social media executives were so slow to process the threat that real-world politics posed to their platforms; and perhaps also why, as the science fiction writer Ted Chiang has suggested, Silicon Valley’s fear of future artificial-intelligence overlords sounds suspiciously like an unknowingly lacerating self-portrait, panic about a way of doing business embodied by the tech titans themselves: Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do—grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.

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Sometimes it can be hard to hold more than one extinction-level threat in your head at once. Nick Bostrom, the pioneering philosopher of AI, has managed it. In an influential 2002 paper taxonomizing what he called “existential risks,” he outlined twenty-three of them—risks “where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.” Bostrom is not a lone doomsday intellectual but one of the leading thinkers currently strategizing ways of corralling, or at any rate conceptualizing, what they consider the species-sized threat from an out-of-control AI. But he does include climate change on his big-picture risk list. He puts it in the subcategory “Bangs,” which he defines as the possibility that “earth-originating intelligent life goes extinct in relatively sudden disaster resulting from either an accident or a deliberate act of destruction.” “Bangs” is the longest of his sub-lists; climate change shares the category with, among others, Badly programmed superintelligence and We’re living in a simulation and it gets shut down.

In his paper, Bostrom also considers the climate-change-adjacent risk of “resource depletion or ecological destruction.” He places that threat in his next category, “Crunches,” which he describes as an episode after which “the potential of humankind to develop into posthumanity is permanently thwarted although human life continues in some form.” His most representative crunch risk is probably Technological arrest: “the sheer technological difficulties in making the transition to the posthuman world might turn out to be so great that we never get there.” Bostrom’s final two categories are “Shrieks,” which he defines as the possibility that “some form of posthumanity is attained but it is an extremely narrow band of what is possible and desirable,” as in the case of “Take-over by a transcending upload” or “Flawed superintelligence” (as opposed to “Badly programmed superintelligence”); and “Whimpers,” which he defines as “a posthuman civilization arises but evolves in a direction that leads gradually but irrevocably to either the complete disappearance of the things we value or to a state where those things are realized to only a minuscule degree of what could have been achieved.” As you may have noticed, although his paper sets out to analyze “human extinction scenarios,” none of his threat assessments beyond “Bangs” actually mention “humanity.” Instead, they are focused on what Bostrom calls “posthumanity” and others often call “transhumanism”—the possibility that technology may quickly carry us across a threshold into a new state of being, so divergent from the one we know today that we would be forced to consider it a true rupture in the evolutionary line. For some, this is simply a vision of nanobots swimming through our bloodstreams, filtering toxins and screening for tumors; for others, it is a vision of human life extracted from tangible reality and uploaded entirely to computers. You may notice here an echo of the Anthropocene. In this vision, though, humans aren’t burdened with environmental wreckage and the problem of navigating it; instead, we simply achieve a technological escape velocity.

It is hard to know just how seriously to take these visions, though they are close to universal among the Bay Area’s futurist vanguard, who have succeeded the NASAs and the Bell Labs of the last century as architects of our imagined future—and who differ among themselves primarily in their assessments of just how long it will take for all this to come to pass. Peter Thiel may complain about the pace of technological change, but maybe he’s doing so because he’s worried it won’t outpace ecological and political devastation. He’s still investing in dubious eternal-youth programs and buying up land in New Zealand (where he might ride out social collapse on the civilization scale). Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, who has distinguished himself as a kind of tech philanthropist with a small universal-basic-income pilot project and recently announced a call for geoengineering proposals he might invest in, has reportedly made a down payment on a brain-upload program that would extract his mind from this world. It’s a project in which he is also an investor, naturally.

For Bostrom, the very purpose of “humanity” is so transparently to engineer a “posthumanity” that he can use the second term as a synonym for the first. This is not an oversight but the key to his appeal in Silicon Valley: the belief that the grandest task before technologists is not to engineer prosperity and well-being for humanity but to build a kind of portal through which we might pass into another, possibly eternal kind of existence, a technological rapture in which conceivably many—the billions lacking access to broadband, to begin with—would be left behind. It would be very hard, after all, to upload your brain to the cloud when you’re buying pay-as-you-go data by the SIM card.

The world that would be left behind is the one being presently pummeled by climate change. And Bostrom isn’t alone, of course, in identifying that risk as species-wide. There are the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of scientists now seeming to scream daily, with each extreme-weather event and new research paper, for the attention of lay readers; and no more hysterical a figure than Barack Obama was fond of using the phrase “existential threat.” And yet it is perhaps a sign of our culture’s heliotropism toward technology that aside perhaps from proposals to colonize other planets, and visions of technology liberating humans from most biological or environmental needs, we have not yet developed anything close to a religion of meaning around climate change that might comfort us, or give us purpose, in the face of possible annihilation.

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Of course, those are religious fantasies: to escape the body and transcend the world.

The first is almost a caricature of privileged thinking, and that it should have entered the dream lives of a new billionaire caste was probably close to inevitable. The second seems like a strategic response to climate panic—securing a backup ecosystem to hedge against the possibility of collapse here—which is precisely as it has been described by its advocates.

But the solution is not a rational one. Climate change does threaten the very basis of life on this planet, but a dramatically degraded environment here will still be much, much closer to livability than anything we might be able to hack out of the dry red soil of Mars. Even in summer, at the equator of that planet, nighttime temperatures are a hundred degrees Fahrenheit below zero; there is no water on its surface, and no plant life. Conceivably, given sufficient funding, a small enclosed colony could be built there, or on another planet; but the costs would be so much higher than for an equivalent artificial ecosystem on Earth, and therefore the scale so much more limited, that anyone proposing space travel as a solution to global warming must be suffering from their own climate delusion. To imagine such a colony could offer material prosperity as abundant as tech plutocrats enjoy in Atherton is to live even more deeply in the narcissism of that delusion—as though it were only as difficult to smuggle luxury to Mars as to Burning Man.

The faith takes a different form among the laity, unable to afford that ticket into space. But articles of faith are offered, considerately, at different price points: smartphones, streaming services, rideshares, and the internet itself, more or less free. And each glimmers with some promise of escape from the struggles and strife of a degraded world.

In “An Account of My Hut,” a memoir of Bay Area house-hunting and climate-apocalypse-watching in the 2017 California wildfire season—which was also the season of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and Maria—Christina Nichol describes a conversation with a young family member who works in tech, to whom she tried to describe the unprecedentedness of the threat from climate change, unsuccessfully. “Why worry?” he replies.

“Technology will take care of everything. If the Earth goes, we’ll just live in spaceships. We’ll have 3D printers to print our food. We’ll be eating lab meat. One cow will feed us all. We’ll just rearrange atoms to create water or oxygen. Elon Musk.”

Elon Musk—it’s not the name of a man but a species-scale survival strategy. Nichol answers, “But I don’t want to live in a spaceship.”

He looked genuinely surprised. In his line of work, he’d never met anyone who didn’t want to live in a spaceship.

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That technology might liberate us, collectively, from the strain of labor and material privation is a dream at least as old as John Maynard Keynes, who predicted his grandchildren would work only fifteen-hour weeks, and yet never ultimately fulfilled. In 1987, the year he won the Nobel Prize, economist Robert Solow famously commented, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” This has been, even more so, the experience of most of those living in the developed world in the decades since—rapid technological change transforming nearly every aspect of everyday life, and yet yielding little or no tangible improvement in any conventional measures of economic well-being. It is probably one explanation for contemporary political discontent—a perception that the world is being almost entirely remade, but in a way that leaves you, as delighted as you may be by Netflix and Amazon and Instagram and Google Maps, more or less exactly where you were before.

The same can be said, believe it or not, for the much-heralded green energy “revolution,” which has yielded productivity gains in energy and cost reductions far beyond the predictions of even the most doe-eyed optimists, and yet has not even bent the curve of carbon emissions downward. We are, in other words, billions of dollars and thousands of dramatic breakthroughs later, precisely where we started when hippies were affixing solar panels to their geodesic domes. That is because the market has not responded to these developments by seamlessly retiring dirty energy sources and replacing them with clean ones. It has responded by simply adding the new capacity to the same system.

Over the last twenty-five years, the cost per unit of renewable energy has fallen so far that you can hardly measure the price, today, using the same scales (since just 2009, for instance, solar energy costs have fallen more than 80 percent). Over the same twenty-five years, the proportion of global energy use derived from renewables has not grown an inch. Solar isn’t eating away at fossil fuel use, in other words, even slowly; it’s just buttressing it. To the market, this is growth; to human civilization, it is almost suicide. We are now burning 80 percent more coal than we were just in the year 2000.

And energy is, actually, the least of it. As the futurist Alex Steffen has incisively put it, in a Twitter performance that functions as a “Powers of Ten” for the climate crisis, the transition from dirty electricity to clean sources is not the whole challenge. It’s just the lowest-hanging fruit: “smaller than the challenge of electrifying almost everything that uses power,” Steffen says, by which he means anything that runs on much dirtier gas engines. That task, he continues, is smaller than the challenge of reducing energy demand, which is smaller than the challenge of reinventing how goods and services are provided—given that global supply chains are built with dirty infrastructure and labor markets everywhere are still powered by dirty energy. There is also the need to get to zero emissions from all other sources—deforestation, agriculture, livestock, landfills. And the need to protect all human systems from the coming onslaught of natural disasters and extreme weather. And the need to erect a system of global government, or at least international cooperation, to coordinate such a project. All of which is a smaller task, Steffen says, “than the monumental cultural undertaking of imagining together a thriving, dynamic, sustainable future that feels not only possible, but worth fighting for.” On this last point I see things differently—the imagination isn’t the hard part, especially for those less informed about the challenges than Steffen is. If we could wish a solution into place by imagination, we’d have solved the problem already. In fact, we have imagined the solutions; more than that, we’ve even developed them, at least in the form of green energy. We just haven’t yet discovered the political will, economic might, and cultural flexibility to install and activate them, because doing so requires something a lot bigger, and more concrete, than imagination—it means nothing short of a complete overhaul of the world’s energy systems, transportation, infrastructure and industry and agriculture. Not to mention, say, our diets or our taste for Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 each year as a million transatlantic flights.

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We think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble,” he writes. “The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.” Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world; for all smartphones, even the “cheap” ones, the number is somewhere between a quarter and a third. Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started.

The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.

To remake each of these systems so that they don’t is less like distributing smartphones or floating wifi balloons over Kenya or Puerto Rico, as Google intends to, than like building an interstate highway system or constructing a subway network or a new kind of power grid connected to a new array of energy producers and new kind of energy consumer. In fact, it is not like that; it is that. All of that and much, much more: intensive infrastructure projects at every level and in every corner of human activity, from new plane fleets to new land use and right down to a new way of making concrete, production of which ranks today as the second most carbon-intensive industry in the world—an industry that is booming, by the way, thanks to China, which recently poured more concrete in three years than the United States used in the entire twentieth century. If the cement industry were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter.

In other words, these are infrastructure projects of a scale so far from our experience, in the U.S. at least, that we hardly expect their existing corollaries to ever even be repaired anymore, instead learning to live with potholes and service delays. On top of which, unlike the internet or smartphones, the requisite technologies are not additive but substitutive, or should be, if we have the good sense to actually retire the dirty old varieties. Which means that all of the new alternatives have to face off with the resistance of entrenched corporate interests and the status-quo bias of consumers who are relatively happy with the lives they have today.

Thankfully, the green energy revolution is already, as they say, “under way.” In fact, of all the necessary components of this broader, zero-carbon revolution, clean energy is probably farthest along. How far along? In 2003, Ken Caldeira, now of the Carnegie Institution for Science, found that the world would need to add clean power sources equivalent to the full capacity of a nuclear plant every single day between 2000 and 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. In 2018, MIT Technology Review surveyed our progress; with three decades left to go, the world was on track to complete the necessary energy revolution in four hundred years.

That gap yawns so wide it could swallow whole civilizations, and indeed threatens to. Into it has crawled that dream of carbon capture: if we can’t rebuild the entire infrastructure of the modern world in time to save it from self-destruction, perhaps we can at least buy ourselves some time by sucking some of its toxic fumes out of the air. Given the indomitable scale of the conventional approach, and given just how little time left we have to complete it, negative emissions may be, at present, a form of magical thinking for climate. They also seem like a last, best hope. And if they work, carbon capture plants will deliver industrial absolution for industrial sin—and initiate, as a result, a whole new theological romance with the power of machine.

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Threaded through the reverie for carbon capture is a fantasy of industrial absolution—that a technology could be almost dreamed into being that could purify the ecological legacy of modernity, even perhaps eliminate its footprint entirely.

The semi-subliminal sales pitch for wind and solar is not dissimilar—clean energy, natural energy, renewable and therefore sustainable energy, inexhaustible, even undiminishable energy, harnessed rather than harvested energy, abundant energy, free energy. Which all sounds quite a lot like nuclear power, at least as it was originally presented and received. Of course, that was back in the 1950s, and it has been decades now since nuclear was seen as a path to energy salvation rather than, as it invariably is today, through the specter of metaphysical contagion.

It was not always this way. In his 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech before the United Nations, Dwight Eisenhower outlined the terms of a standing-offer arms trade that was also a moral bargain: as a reward to any nation disavowing the pursuit of nuclear weapons, and as a kind of penance for having developed the horrible technology in the first place, the United States would offer aid in the form of nuclear energy, which it would also be cultivating at home.

For a speech delivered by a president who was also a military man, it is a remarkably lyrical lament that is also a peacetime call-to-arms—in fact, it evokes in a modern reader quite beautifully the threat from climate change. After briefly describing the dramatic expansion of the capacity of the American nuclear fleet, which had in the eight years since the war grown twenty-five times more powerful and plainly terrified him, and then what it meant for the United States to have gained Soviet Russia as a nuclear rival, Eisenhower continues: To stop there would be to accept helplessly the probability of civilization destroyed, the annihilation of the irreplaceable heritage of mankind handed down to us from generation to generation, and the condemnation of mankind to begin all over again the age-old struggle upward from savagery towards decency, and right, and justice. Surely no sane member of the human race could discover victory in such desolation. Could anyone wish his name to be coupled by history with such human degradation and destruction? Occasional pages of history do record the faces of the “great destroyers,” but the whole book of history reveals mankind’s never-ending quest for peace and mankind’s God-given capacity to build.

It has been at least a generation since Americans might have casually read “mankind’s God-given capacity to build” as a reference to nuclear power—a generation since the world stopped believing nuclear power was, in an environmental sense, “free,” and started thinking of it in terms of nuclear war, meltdown, mutation, and cancer. That we remember the names of power-plant disasters is a sign of just how scarred we feel by them: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima.

But the scars are almost phantom ones, given the casualty numbers. The death toll of the incident at Three Mile Island is in some dispute, as many activists believe the true impact of radiation was suppressed—perhaps a reasonable belief, since the official account insists on no adverse health impacts at all. But the most pedigreed research suggests the meltdown increased cancer risk, within a ten-mile radius, by less than one-tenth of 1 percent. For Chernobyl, the official death count is 47, though some estimates run higher—even as high as 4,000. For Fukushima, according to a United Nations report, “no discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected among exposed members of the public or their descendants.” Had none of the 100,000 living in the evacuation zone ever left, perhaps a few hundred might have ultimately died of cancers related to the radiation.

Any number of dead is a tragedy, but more than 10,000 people die each day, globally, from the small-particulate pollution produced by burning carbon. This is not even broaching the subject of warming and its impacts. A rule change to pollution standards for coal producers, proposed by Trump’s EPA in 2018, would kill an additional 1,400 Americans annually, the agency itself acknowledged; globally, pollution kills as many as nine million each year.

We live with that pollution, and with those death tolls, and hardly notice them; the curving concrete towers of nuclear plants, by contrast, stand astride the horizon like Chekhov’s proverbial gun. Today, despite a variety of projects aimed at producing cheap nuclear energy, the price of new plants remains high enough that it is hard to make a persuasive argument that more “green” investment be directed toward them rather than installations of wind and solar. But the case for decommissioning and dismantling existing plants is considerably weaker, and yet that is exactly what is happening—from the United States, where both Three Mile Island and Indian Point are being closed down, to Germany, where so much nuclear power has recently been retired that the country is growing its carbon emissions despite a state-of-the-world green energy program. For this, Angela Merkel has been called the “Climate Chancellor.” —

The contaminationist view of nuclear power is a misguided climate parable, arising nevertheless from a perceptive environmentalist perspective—that the healthy, clean natural world is made toxic by the intrusions and interventions of human industry. But the main lesson from the church of technology runs in the other direction, instructing us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to regard the world beyond our phones as less real, less urgent, and less meaningful than the worlds made available to us through those screens, which happen to be worlds protected from climate devastation. As Andreas Malm has wondered, “How many will play augmented reality games on a planet that is six degrees warmer?” The poet and musician Kate Tempest puts it more brinily: “Staring into the screen so we don’t have to see the planet die.” Presumably, you can already feel this transformation underfoot, in your own life—scrolling through photos of your baby when your actual baby is right in front of you, reading trivial Twitter threads while your spouse is speaking. In Silicon Valley, even tech critics tend to see the problem as a form of addiction; but, like all addictions, it expresses a value judgment, if one that makes the unaddicted uncomfortable—in this case, that we find the world of our screens more rewarding, or safer, in ways so hard to justify and explain that there isn’t really a word for it other than “preferable.” This preference is much more likely to grow than shrink, which may seem like cultural devolution, perhaps especially to temperamental declinists. It could conceivably also be a psychologically useful coping mechanism for living, still within the consumptive bourgeois tradition, in a dramatically degraded natural world. A generation from now, god help us, tech addiction may even look “adaptive.”