Tuesday 31 May 2011

Mutually Assured Distraction

After watching All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace last night, I started thinking again about the climate change issue. As the programme talked through our collective failure to revolutionise ourselves as a leaderless, cooperative society, the lack of room in those ideals for the basic human natures of power and influence and how our own democracy works against us, making us individualistic, self-obsessed walking money bags, I started to think about our collective failure to handle or even properly address the fact that we're quite possibly screwed.

Imagine a protagonist in a story, set in a world that faces potential destruction in the hands of a population and governmental system who's relentless apathy and avarice blinds them to the obvious damage they're wreaking. Imagine that in that story, instead of attempting to change the situation, the protagonist simply ignored it or at best mildly worried about it sometimes. You'd probably think that the protagonist was a bit weak or that the author had chickened out of dealing with a complex problem; you'd probably have thought that you might have done things differently or at least cared more. Well, you didn't. And neither did I. In fact, not very many other people did either.

So why not? Why aren't we doing something about it? If your protagonist had been born into a doomed world, you'd naturally expect them to do something about it, right? Why aren't we that upset about being thrown the hot potato or mad about turning up to the party to find out all the drinks have gone and you've got to help tidy up? Why aren't we angrier?

Well, I think there are a couple of potential reasons, further to those I mentioned in my last post.

The first, as Machines... pointed out, depends upon the system that we've set up for ourselves. Our democracy encourages our individualistic tendencies towards self-serving goals; we care less because we're too busy looking at our own navels, worrying about how the products we buy define us as people.

Most of you reading this will, like me, have been born at the tail end of the last century; too young in the eighties to have understood the problem, cosily living out our teens in the naive Clinton wonder years bubble, cowering in fear of random terrorist attacks in our early twenties and more recently groaning at the latest round of public service cuts set out by our financial markets controlled government.

Since we became old enough to start getting what was going on, somehow other issues always seem to be getting in the way, which I presume has been happening much the same with previous generations to ours. Not even extreme examples of environmental disasters like the Deepwater Horizon spill really make much headway into the overall climate debate. There's always a bigger ticket news item, more directly affecting our lives that the one that's looming right there in front of us.

This is my second point really; as a people, we're not very good at reacting to foresight. It's much more in our nature to react to things that have happened than to things that might. Think about the recent protests against the spending cuts; why did we wait until after the government had made up its mind before kicking up a stink? We all knew it was coming, so why wait until afterwards? If we'd have acted up front, when the coalition was at its inception, perhaps we'd have had a better impact on the outcome. By protesting post the decision, we simply allowed the government to do what it wanted and then say "well you're stuck with it now" when we all started moaning.

Like I said before, collectively we're like children, unable to make the mature decision to stop eating sweets before our teeth rot out. Just as Machines... pointed out our inability to construct a truly egalitatian society due to our basic human desire for power, we're unable to unite ourselves to fix the planet due to other failings in our own nature.

My criticism of Machines... would be that it didn't present any solutions to the problems it laid out. It's easy to say things won't or don't work but harder to say what will. On my part, not being a scientist, I don't have a huge amount to suggest on the climate front, but one thought I'll finish with is that if our own human nature is the problem, perhaps if we can remove that from the equation, we might be ok? Perhaps the solution to humankind's immaturity is an external parent figure, taking the reins on the problems we can't bring ourselves to solve. Perhaps that solution is taking shape in our research into Artificial Intelligence? By creating a machine to think for us, to be driven by different motivations to us, perhaps we can eventually make the decisions that we've so far been unable to?

That said, in all likelihood, a truly intelligent machine created by humans would be subject to the very same humanity we are. If we train it to think, wouldn't it think exactly like we do? Perhaps hedging our bets on absolution isn't the answer either...

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