So you haven’t got time to read through hefty books about the AI industry. You’ve had fun with image generators, and you find chatbots useful although occasionally alarming. But there’s information firing at you from all directions, and it’s wildly contradictory, alarming, exciting, and horrifying, all at the same time. What the heck are you supposed to do?
Tag: climate change
But What If…?
What if we were brave enough to value the things that actually matter?
Tipping Points
Years ago, while worrying about climate change, I took both comfort and alarm from the idea that there would come a point where everything climate scientists had been predicting for decades would come to pass, and no one would be able to ignore climate science or dismiss climate change anymore. At that point, surely, we would act, and act fast. That, if nothing else, would be our tipping point.
The difference between climate change and the threat of nuclear war
"I grew up under the threat of nuclear war. Carl Sagan told us it was inevitable. It didn't happen, and we're not worried about nuclear war anymore, so obviously panicking about climate change is the same - in a few years we'll realise there was nothing to be scared of. It's not the crisis we think it is." I completely understand the attractiveness of this theory. "We are under threat. That's scary. But we were under threat before and that turned out to be nothing, so this one will too, right? RIGHT? PLEASE??"
Grant Ennis
"So like while we would never believe that if we saw a stone rolling down a mountain, that if we all just stared at it and willed it back up the hill, it would do that, we do tend to believe that if we all individually do our part for the environment or ask people to just individually act that because people want that to be so and want that to work, that it just will, we believe that if we give people more information than then somehow just spontaneously they will change their behaviour, which really is quite fanciful."