Questions SEP 24

GT 3.8--3.14 (thru Winter...). WW 189-225 (thru History After Progress). McK thru Aldo Leopold...

Presentation: Christina Guest

Good News: keyshop says I now have access to the building after 4:30 pm. So, we can look forward to going out again...when it's not too hot or too loud.

Also: I've bumped Kathryn Modine's "Interconnected Planet" blog up, to just under the NEXT block in the sidebar on the right. Do please read and comment (and share your comments here as well).

GT (please try to formulate and address discussion questions pertaining to the following): 

1. Greta says 3 billion people in the world use less energy annually than a standard American what? How does that make you feel? 154
2. What should we be celebrating? And what have we been told to celebrate? 155-6 
3. What's Greta's definition of hope? 157
4. Governments have acted ___, not ___. What kind of shift is required, for that to change? What, besides changing our lifestyles, must we do? 159-61
5. What are sacrifice zones? Who populates them? 163
6. What is fast becoming the planet's most significant human threat? 166
7. How many displaced people does the World Bank forecast for sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia by mid-century? 167
8. The fulfillment of what reasonable expectations is the least we owe the next generation? 170
9. What should one consider, before deciding anything important? 172
10. What is "the sun's daughter's" classic hopeful question? 174-5

WW

1. What's the predominant worldview of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley? What's their greatest concern? Why is it a "strange evolutionary stage"? 189-90  Are you more hopeful or fearful of AI?
2. Who is Nick Bostrom and what's on his "big picture risk list"? 191-2  What do you think of transhumanism and posthumanism? Would posthumanity suffer greater social inequities than humanity so far?
3. What, besides geoengineering, have Peter Thiel and Sam Altman invested in? 192-3  Do you want to be uploaded?
4. What (besides the name of the X-man) is Elon Musk? 195 Do you want to live on Mars or is a spaceship?
5. Why hasn't the green revolution happened yet? 196-8  Do you think it will happen soon enough? 
6. According to the IPCC, we have how many years to halve emissions (bearing in mind that this bookj was published in 2019-20)? 198
7. What's the second most carbon-intensive industry in the world? 199  (Hope they're working on that in the new building across the parking lot.)
8. What form of magical thinking for climate could become a new theology? 200-01
9. What's the main lesson from the church of technology? 
10. Critics of Al Gore are calling attention to what, in the words of Thomas Piketty? 207  Do you agree that policy change is more urgent than personal choices?
11. How do Mann and Wainwright re-purpose Thomas Hobbes? 212
12. What's the wheat myth, according to Yuval Noah Harari? 219  Are you going to read his new book Nexus?*  Do you agree that our era is a "blip..."? 220
13. What kind of time does climate change threaten to impose? 224

McK

1. What did poet Robinson Jeffers identify as the modern disease? 251  What do you think of Tor House?
2. COMMENT?: “The quality of owning freezes you forever in "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we.”
   ― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
   
3. What would Bill McKibben prefer as our national anthem? 258 
4. Prior to the Parkland shooting, what was Marjory Stoneman Douglas most known for? 260
5. How does McKibben characterize Aldo Leopold's "land ethic"? 265
6. Please post your discussion questions

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Hidden Brain podcast-

Fighting despair. Every morning, you wake up and face the world. What does it look like to you? Do you see a paradise of endless opportunities, where people are friendly and helpful? Or a world filled with injustice, where people cannot be trusted? In the final installment of this year's You 2.0 series, we talk with psychologist Jamil Zaki about how we become disillusioned and distrustful of the world, and how to balance realism with hope.

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The Big Big Big Big Big Picture

A big new study zeroes in on our dilemma

"...these temperatures are much higher than anything humans have experienced, and they guarantee a world with radically different regimes of drought and deluge, radically different ocean levels and fire seasons. They imply a world fundamentally strange to us, with entirely different seasons and moods—and if that doesn’t challenge bare survival, it certainly challenges the survival of our civilizations. Unlike all the species that came before us, we have built a physical shell for that civilization, a geography of cities and ports and farms that we can’t easily move as the temperature rises. And of course the poorest people, who have done the least to cause the trouble, will suffer out of all proportion as that shift starts to happen.

But that’s not the really scary part. The really scary part is how fast it’s moving.

In fact, nowhere in that long record have the scientists been able to find a time when it’s warming as fast as it is right now. “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about,” Tierney said.

Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10 Celsius higher and killed off 95 percent of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took fifty thousand years—our three degree Celsius increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.

Our only hope of avoiding utter ruin—our only hope that our western world, in the blink of an eye, won’t produce catastrophe on this geologic scale—is to turn off those volcanoes immediately. And that, of course, requires replacing coal and gas and oil with something else. The only something else on offer right now, scalable in the few years we still have to work with, is the rays of the sun, and the wind that sun produces, and the batteries that can store its power for use at night.

Another new analysis this week, this one from the energy thinktank Ember, shows that 2024 is seeing another year of surging solar installations—when the year ends there will be 30% more solar power on this planet than when it began. Numbers like that, if we can keep that acceleration going for a few more years, give us a fighting chance.

That’s what all those seminars and cocktail parties and protests in New York over the next week will ultimately be about—the desperate attempt to keep this rift in our geological history from getting any bigger than it must. As this new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.

We need to stand in awe for a moment before the scope of earth’s long history. And then we need to get the hell to work." Bill McKibben

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*NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari

In the summer of 2022, a software engineer named Blake Lemoine was fired by Google after an interview with The Washington Post in which he claimed that LaMDA, the chatbot he had been working on, had achieved sentience.

A few months later, in March 2023, an open letter from the Future of Life Institute, signed by hundreds of technology leaders including Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk, called on A.I. labs to pause their research. Artificial intelligence, it claimed, posed “profound risks to society and humanity.”

The following month, Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of A.I.,” quit his post at Google, telling this newspaper that he regretted his life’s work. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he warned.

Over the last few years we have become accustomed to hare-eyed messengers returning from A.I.’s frontiers with apocalyptic warnings. And yet, real action in the form of hard regulation has been little in evidence. Last year’s executive order on A.I. was, as one commentator put it, “directional and aspirational” — a shrewdly damning piece of faint praise... 

…The threats A.I. poses are not the ones that filmmakers visualize: Kubrick’s HAL trapping us in the airlock; a fascist RoboCop marching down the sidewalk. They are more insidious, harder to see coming, but potentially existential. They include the catastrophic polarizing of discourse when social media algorithms designed to monopolize our attention feed us extreme, hateful material. Or the outsourcing of human judgment — legal, financial or military decision-making — to an A.I. whose complexity becomes impenetrable to our own understanding.

Echoing Churchill, Harari warns of a “Silicon Curtain” descending between us and the algorithms we have created, shutting us out of our own conversations — how we want to act, or interact, or govern ourselves… (nyt, continues)

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive?

NEXUS considers how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age through the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. NEXUS explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and of rediscovering our shared humanity. g'r

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John Green says we shouldn't surrender to apocalyptic despair. Not yet.