What the world needs now is directions for reducing our dependence on technology
A Silicon Valley employee told a friend of mine that he sees nothing sustainable about the info-technology (IT) industry. He considers last July’s worldwide shutdown of airlines, banks, hospitals and emergency services (caused by an erroneous software update) a warning. While Silicon Valley companies have stopped hiring people (because they anticipate that A.I.s will soon do jobs at a much lower cost), Silicon Valley workers feel scared that info-technologies will continue; and they fear that IT will stop.
Roger McNamee, once a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, says, “For too long, the public has trusted Silicon Valley. For 50 years, the products that came out of the Valley made us more capable and more productive.” While manufacturers promote every new technology product as if it will improve what came before, McNamee says, “That has not been the case since the iPhone was introduced in 2007.” The IT industry, he observes, is now displacing workers with artificial intelligence, displacing real currency with crypto, and getting rid of any kind of taxation on wealth. “And so,” he says, “we need to change our relationship to technology. We need to say ‘No’ to A.I.”
In a society that depends on vulnerable technologies like electricity, inter-continental shipping, individually-owned cars, the Internet, mobile communications, and now, A.I., how does anyone change their relationship to technology? How do we say “no” to A.I.? To what do we say “Yes?”
None of these men gives directions.
WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
A.I. is a set of computer technologies that assembles and stores billions of bits of data and uses algorithms and computational power to recognize patterns, make decisions, make predictions, solve problems—and create new things. If you get help from Siri or Alexa, pose questions to search engines like Google, or receive product recommendations based on previous purchases, you’re engaging A.I.
Weather forecasters use A.I.
Robots that weld and transport die casings on assembly lines…are A.I.s.
A.I.s book travel arrangements, check-in guests at hotels, mix drinks, deliver meals to restaurant tables, connect Uber drivers with passengers, and tell owners when their car needs maintenance.
They predict mining outcomes.
A.I.s predict the likelihood of a person acquiring a disease, identify harmful interactions between different drugs, predict how a contagious disease could spread.
The military uses A.I.
So—what’s the trouble? Well, when an A.I. prediction is just a little off, serious consequences can result. And yet, we don’t require “truth tests” that insure that data going in and coming out of an A.I. are correct. Many people trust A.I. without question. A.I. can exclude humans from design decisions—call this “Black Box BioTech”—including to create new proteins and new genetic sequences for (say) new pharmaceuticals.
There are more vulnerabilities here than any human can address. Given the amount of electricity that A.I.’s data centers require, they could “eat” the power grid—and leave the world in darkness. Air pollution from data centers’ burning of fossil fuels contributes to multiple diseases. To keep its computers cool, a single data center can consume five million gallons of drinking water per day.
None of this speaks to the energy, extractions, water or ecological ravaging that go into manufacturing a data center’s coolers, computers (needing replacement every few years)…or the building itself.
None of this speaks to the hundreds of billions of dollars that A.I. providers demand—while some of us struggle for beans and rice.
None of this speaks to human souls’ changing as we “relate” to robots.
THE POSSIBILITIES OF LIVING WITHIN OUR LOCAL MEANS
For a while, I’ve thought that we could learn what our daily tools take from the Earth, decrease dependence on goods and services with international supply chains, and restore respectful relations with nature by limiting ourselves to local energy, local water and local extractions. We could limit ourselves to goods and services produced with our bioregion’s resources. Define a bioregion as the land, minerals and water available within a watershed. (The U.S. has six main watersheds.) Define local as within a 500-mile radius of one’s home.
I investigated the possibilities:
Starting with food, could we meet basic needs locally? After nearly 20 years of gardening, my husband and I can grow two percent of our food. Salt, coconut oil, mung beans, basmati rice, bananas, fish and other basic necessities come from far, far away. We can walk to grocery stores—a great privilege. But in cold, windy weather (or blazing hot weather), I use a car. As for storage, I don’t know how to survive more than a few days without a fridge and freezer.
Energy and transportation. Yeesh. Our rented house has a wood stove that heats with local, dead wood; but our appliances and electronics (made from extractions and chemicals from other countries) are powered by natural gas. Our vehicles were made in other countries and run on gasoline.
I should clarify that since manufacturing solar PVs, industrial wind turbines, batteries and e-vehicles each requires hundreds of international supply chains—and, for backup or charging, a grid powered by natural gas, coal or nuclear or hydro power—we can’t consider any of these technologies local. Further, covering land with paved roads, fields of solar panels, fields of wind turbines, data centers and shopping malls (for examples) disrupts healthy water cycling, one of the planet’s main cooling mechanisms.
As for telecommunications, the vast majority of humans now use a mobile device. In 2000, 97.6% of homes had a landline. By 2023’s end, less than 30% of homes had one. In 2023, 80% of all 911 calls came from a cellphonem abd 73% of consumers used mobile banking. Millions of people now routinely monitor sugar levels, blood pressure and sleep issues with their smartphones. Hospitals routinely send people home from surgery with an app that monitors vital signs. Alas, we cannot make telecommunications—including landlines—local: manufacturing devices and their infrastructures requires international supply chains. Operating them requires a nationwide power grid and international access networks.
Regarding work, I’m challenged to think of a job that doesn’t require a computer. A friend recently applied to teach yoga at a local studio, and her first interview was with an A.I.
As for a neighborhood, defined by people whose survival depends on each other, well, our rented house is now surrounded by houses owned by people with one or two other homes…and by AirB&Bs. People live in our neighborhood for a week or a weekend. Their survival does not depend on my survival.
So—an individual household cannot sustain itself by living within its bioregion’s offerings. Still, I wonder if a cooperative community could live within its bioregion’s ecological limits.
HOW DO WE MOVE TOWARD LIVING WITHIN LOCAL ECOLOGICAL LIMITS?
A recent NY Times opinion piece suggests that to prepare for the future, young adults need help identifying and pursuing their own goals and assessing their progress. This makes sense to me—and we’ll need goals that respect ecological limits and minimize dependence on electronics and other vulnerable technologies.
To survive chaos, we’ll need to learn to share and cooperate.
While it’s hard to interest techno-optimists in degrowth, hoping that reliable commonsense will simply “emerge” from large databases has proven unrealistic. Meanwhile, Europe has implemented a host of regulations to limit big tech growth.
Enrollment in nature schools has soared.
One friend started a local garden club. Existing members can introduce a new one. (They now number 105.) Facebook provides their platform. Meeting on weekends, academics, and asking for donations did not work. People want to have fun. They meet regularly to plant flowers and help each others with light projects. Call it the start of a modern neighborhood.
Some people organize seed swaps, clothing swaps and mending and making circles. In Hungary, some people have shifted to freight-by-biking. Some people avoid credit cards and use cash whenever possible.
In Portland , Oregon, people turned a run-down 35-unit apartment complex into a thriving village.
Jason Hickel writes why less is more.
CLOSING QUESTIONS
To reduce your dependence on international supply chains, what have you tried?
What have you tried to reduce your dependence on A.I.?
What has worked?
What has not worked?
What skills or info do you need to move toward living within your bioregion’s offerings?
In the comment section, please share what you’re learning and questioning!
I love this article. So clear and so compelling. Thanks for being you.
Thank you for thinking this through
It’s extraordinarily important