The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing the World's Climate

 

Adam McKay, director of Don't Look Up, points out what should be obvious but is easy to ignore.

Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. There are the lofty-sounding promises to reach “Net-zero emissions by 2050,” as if 24 years from now was soon enough. There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations. There’s the accusation that anyone who expresses urgency is a “doomer.” There are those who treat climate as an abstraction to win political campaigns, first arguing that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was a victory despite doing nowhere near enough to address the scale of climate collapse, and more recently that Democrats should just stop talking about climate and focus on more “winnable” issues. Most damaging and common of all, there are those who simply don’t mention it.

All of these distortions have robbed us of the most critical element people need to understand a threat and adjust their actions accordingly: context.

And make no mistake, when it comes to how much time we have, the data and the geological record are crystal clear. 

For some badly-needed context, the last three years, likely for the first time in over 100,000 years, have averaged above the Paris Accords’ “do not cross” 1.5 degrees celsius planetary warming. Only ten years ago, that was considered catastrophic, but now mainstream news tells us it’s just a number.

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Let’s do the context thing again: 2C will mean we have completely left the stable climate period known as the Holocene. This is the 11,000-year-old era that has given us large-scale crop and livestock agriculture, which gave us cities, written language, modern science and medicine, and warm beds and showers.

Before that, for hundreds of thousands of years in the Pleistocene era, humans (and our hominid ancestors) spent most of their time running from drought, fires, floods, extreme cold and heat, predators, and each other. 

The population was likely no more than a few million people spread across the whole planet. At one point we may have almost gone extinct, with just 10,000 Homo sapiens clinging to life. But after the advent of the Holocene and its remarkably stable climate, in only 100 centuries the world population has risen to 8 billion.

That is what we stand to lose. In fact, if our institutions, news and elected officials continue to feed and water the oil company-conceived mega-falsehood that climate breakdown is something just “our great-grandkids need to worry about,”  human civilization as we know it will collapse and billions could die. And we’re not talking about the far distant future. We are talking about collapse within years, not centuries. For real.

There is No AI

 

I've searched with little success for ideas about how we can handle AI so that it benefits rather than harms society. Here is a suggestion from Jaron Lanier.  It was published by the New Yorker in 2023, when GPT-4 was the latest model. Time named Lanier to its list of 100 most influential people in 2015. 

A program like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can write sentences to order, is something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics. Programs that create images to order are something like a version of online image search, but with a system for combining the pictures. In both cases, it’s people who have written the text and furnished the images. The new programs mash up work done by human minds. What’s innovative is that the mashup process has become guided and constrained, so that the results are usable and often striking. This is a significant achievement and worth celebrating—but it can be thought of as illuminating previously hidden concordances between human creations, rather than as the invention of a new mind.

As far as I can tell, my view flatters the technology. After all, what is civilization but social collaboration? Seeing A.I. as a way of working together, rather than as a technology for creating independent, intelligent beings, may make it less mysterious—less like hal 9000 or Commander Data. But that’s good, because mystery only makes mismanagement more likely.

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This concept, which I’ve contributed to developing, is usually called “data dignity.” It appeared, long before the rise of big-model “A.I.,” as an alternative to the familiar arrangement in which people give their data for free in exchange for free services, such as internet searches or social networking. Data dignity is sometimes known as “data as labor” or “plurality research.” The familiar arrangement has turned out to have a dark side: because of “network effects,” a few platforms take over, eliminating smaller players, like local newspapers. Worse, since the immediate online experience is supposed to be free, the only remaining business is the hawking of influence. Users experience what seems to be a communitarian paradise, but they are targeted by stealthy and addictive algorithms that make people vain, irritable, and paranoid.

In a world with data dignity, digital stuff would typically be connected with the humans who want to be known for having made it. In some versions of the idea, people could get paid for what they create, even when it is filtered and recombined through big models, and tech hubs would earn fees for facilitating things that people want to do. Some people are horrified by the idea of capitalism online, but this would be a more honest capitalism. The familiar “free” arrangement has been a disaster.

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Consider what might happen if A.I.-driven tree-trimming robots are introduced. Human tree trimmers might find themselves devalued or even out of work. But the robots could eventually allow for a new type of indirect landscaping artistry. Some former workers, or others, might create inventive approaches—holographic topiary, say, that looks different from different angles—that find their way into the tree-trimming models. With data dignity, the models might create new sources of income, distributed through collective organizations. Tree trimming would become more multifunctional and interesting over time; there would be a community motivated to remain valuable. Each new successful introduction of an A.I. or robotic application could involve the inauguration of a new kind of creative work. In ways large and small, this could help ease the transition to an economy into which models are integrated.

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There are also non-altruistic reasons for A.I. companies to embrace data dignity. The models are only as good as their inputs. It’s only through a system like data dignity that we can expand the models into new frontiers. Right now, it’s much easier to get an L.L.M. to write an essay than it is to ask the program to generate an interactive virtual-reality world, because there are very few virtual worlds in existence. Why not solve that problem by giving people who add more virtual worlds a chance for prestige and income?

Just Work: The Gig Economy, Platform Capitalism and the Battle for Worker Rights

 

A comic by Tom Humberstone about gig workers and the need to organise, with loads of local Edinburgh flavour.

GPCE Distinguished Reviewer

I am a Distinguished Reviewer of GPCE 2026, colocated with ECOOP in Brussels. The award went to two out of a program committee of 33, putting me in the top 6%.

Don't Let Them Block Our Indyref Mandate

 

Brought to you by Believe in Scotland. You can sign the petition here.

Tell your elected representatives and the Prime Minister that blocking our indyref mandate is unacceptable.

The Scottish Parliament elections in May 2026 returned the largest ever pro-independence majority in the history of the Scottish Parliament. That democratic majority provides an undeniable mandate for a second Scottish independence referendum, and the Parliament has now confirmed that mandate by demanding the UK Government transfer the powers required to hold that referendum.

Every one of those 73 MSPs stood on a manifesto platform supporting Scotland’s right to choose its own future and calling for a second independence referendum. The Scottish people have therefore elected a parliament with a clear democratic mandate to demand a referendum on Scottish independence.

All democrats must believe that the Scottish people have an inalienable right to choose their own future. The Scottish people have voted for a second independence referendum. Any attempt to deny them the right to choose their own future is an assault on Scottish parliamentary democracy and an affront to the people of Scotland - so that mandate must not be denied.