Why AI Needs to Power the Degrowth Transition
We have entered a period in the Anthropocene epoch characterized by two accelerating man-made forces.
The first, climate change, is altering our planet’s living conditions at a pace that is outstripping forecasts and simulations. The second, AI, is a disruptive technology that is transforming industries and the way we live.
The good news is that the dynamics behind the two forces at play are interrelated and one can potentially be used to balance the other. As such, AI must be part of the solution to the climate crisis but should not be guided by blind techno-optimism; it needs to be managed by decisive structural changes that solve the looming ecological collapse, rather than accelerating the destructive dynamics of capitalism.
Let us take a closer look at the two forces at play and how they are linked.
Climate Change and the Paradigm of Neoliberalism
Since the 1950s, we have been in a period of great acceleration in which population growth and industrialization have meant an ever-increasing ecological footprint of our civilization.
Add to this trajectory of sheer limitless growth, the major challenge, that it is fueled by fossil fuels. The primary driver for climate change, responsible for about 65% of global emissions. The perverse effects of this fossil fuel driven growth and its effect on humans, has been known by oil and gas companies for decades. If you want to know more; just listen to the investigative journalism of Amy Westervelt’s podcast Drilled, and it is more than apparent how Big Oil has copied Big Tobacco’s playbook of ‘getting away with murder’.
Since the 1970s, numerous studies have pointed to the fact that a growth trajectory driven by exploitation of the natural world would lead to major ecological collapse (most famously the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth). Thus, what seems now not only to be a looming threat has been documented and known for decades among decision-makers and leaders.
50 years on, we find ourselves in a full-blown climate crisis that requires drastic course correction and systemic change. One wonders whether generations of decision-makers have deliberately looked the other way or simply just failed to find a way to change this outlook?
A look at the historical context of the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, provides some answers. The period was largely characterized by stagflation and a global arms race between the two superpowers of the day: USA and the Soviet Union.
Stagflation in the Western economies was caused by several factors, the most important of which were soaring energy prices and rising commodity prices. These were largely driven by the increased economic sovereignty of nations in the Global South, which led to widespread price hikes across the full spectrum of economic activity. Signs of a fundamentally sick system, perhaps?
The high-income nations of the Global North were in a position to decide whether to accept this slowdown in growth. A slowdown that could potentially have led to greater global equality and an opportunity for adjusting the growth dynamics of capitalism to accommodate the climate threat. Or, whether to disrupt the development for the sake of their own growth, maintaining the imbalance of power and try to get the upper hand in the global arms race.
As history goes to show, the Global North, banked on obstructing the global equality for the sake of securing stable supply of resources and low labor costs. This was obtained by systematically undermining an economic rise of the Global South and has to a large degree been carried out with institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) as instruments for spreading neoliberal policies that would allow for the resource flow from Global South to North. These actions ensured that resource prices remained under control and that geopolitics remained in favor of the Global North, namely the United States and Western Europe.
The answers to the unwillingness to change the trajectory of the climate crisis can therefore largely be found in the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism and the geopolitical arms race, which took priority over the looming climate crisis.
For a more in-depth analysis of this issue, the Ecological Economics and Degrowth movements offer many good references — in particular the works of Jason Hickel and Timothee Parrique is worth checking out.
For the purposes of this article, the most important thing to emphasize is the lack of concern for planetary boundaries in the arms race between corporates and between nation states in the current capitalist paradigm. Therefore, it is safe to assume that any technological advances (such as AI) will be used primarily to enable powerful corporates and nation states to accumulate more wealth and power, rather than to make the world a more equal, secure and environmentally safe place.
The Evolution of AI
With the climate crisis and the dynamics of the neoliberal paradigm in mind, let’s look at the big changes that AI is about to bring to industries and job markets.
With the 4th Industrial revolution (2000–2020) we achieved the datafication of virtually everything, creating a world without borders for software.
With the evolution of AI, we are entering the next stage of this revolution with boundless opportunity for automation and optimization. We are essentially on the verge of a new world where Big Tech is even more in the driver’s seat. We might not even be in the car anymore (?).
The progress of AI has taken some big leaps in recent years, which has become evident to most people with the emergence of OpenAI’s GPT series, and we can most likely expect the exponential progress to continue, considering the amount of investment being poured into AI.
The trajectory is worrisome given that we are dealing with a very powerful technology, which is being developed in the very same paradigm that has led our civilization into the climate crisis. A former business officer at Google X, Mo Gawdat (author of the book Scary Smart), argues that the genie is already out of the bottle since the evolution of AI has been sped up without taking the proper time and measures for ensuring the ethics of AI.
The advances in AI over the latest years, he reckons, are a bit like a game of Tetris where you know a block has been placed wrong. You can go on for a while, but eventually you know it will hit you. Namely giving AI’s access to the open internet and giving them the ability to code worries Gawdat, as not even the AI scientists fully comprehend how the black boxed AI models learn and resonate.
Besides the worries about the potential consequences of creating and unleashing a superior intelligence to humans, we can expect the near-term impacts of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) in the way we live and work to accelerate at scale soon.
While the previous industrial revolutions lowered the price of resources by exploiting nature, the AI evolution has the potential to lower the need for human labor.
Following the simple logic of capitalism, the disruptive force of AI will therefore create a seismic shift in the way organizations operate and dramatically reduce the demand for human labor as a result of the increased automation and efficiency gains being unlocked by AI.
We must therefore recognize that the AI evolution will soon disrupt our way of life, entirely. While it is too late to hit pause to ensure alignment of AI with the human cause, we may however still be able to steer the development in a favorable direction for maintaining a livable planet with decisive structural changes.
Joining Forces
Despite the clear need to alter the course of ecological collapse, our civilization has so far proven to be at best inadequate — some would say we are not even trying. We are nowhere near the 1.5-degree Celsius temperature target above pre-industrial levels, known as the upper limit for a climate-safe future for our species, let alone many others already lost. Current efforts suggest that we will only increase the pressures on Earth systems, including carbon emissions, ocean acidification, deforestation and biodiversity loss, water stress, etc.
The ongoing scandals surrounding the United Arab Emirates, as host of the annual Conference of the Parties, aka COP or climate conference, and its strongest capture by the fossil fuel industry to date, show par excellence how today’s economic system is controlled by corporates and states that have deliberately chosen to maintain the human-harming status quo for as long as possible.
With every single day, it is becoming painfully clear that we will not change the trajectory of climate change in time without a paradigm shift, breaking the unsustainable systemic structures of neoliberalism.
Our choice is, whether we seize the opportunity of the technological revolution of AI to power a greater transition. Or, whether we continue on the path we are on, leading to accelerating ecological collapse and inequality.
By ‘joining forces’ we will give ourselves the opportunity to create a more livable future. We will have to adapt our systems to the revolution of AI no matter what. However, if we do not proactively use the opportunity of the disruptive power of AI to solve the underlying dysfunctions of capitalism, the AI revolution will only accelerate the catastrophic path we are on.
If we don’t change course, it will eventually lead to a breakdown of the systems we know of today, and ultimately a different kind of revolution. That kind of revolution will be the most brutal kind, powered by inflation, faltering food and water systems, mass-migration, and wars.
It will not be easy to change a well-established complex capitalist structure, but the alternative is simply far more scary.
What Needs to Happen Now
“Decarbonizing with Growth is like trying to run down an escalator that is accelerating upwards” (Jason Hickel)
Recognizing that we have passed our chance of resolving the climate crisis within the current capitalist paradigm, demands us to re-think the systems we have built and have the courage to implement large structural changes. Empirical evidence suggests that Green Growth is merely a delusion when it comes to solving real problems. We therefore need to start implementing decisive structural changes for a degrowth future that break the destructive dynamics of neoliberalism.
We need to radically change the meaning of value and success in our societies. That could start by decoupling financial performance from short-term reporting cycles and doubling down on taxing economic growth from corporates in polluting industries, such as fossil fuels, industrial meat production, fast fashion, shipping and aviation, etc. These taxes could be used to fund Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Universal Basic Services (UBS) schemes, supporting an orderly and just transition. This will limit the acceleration of global inequalities and help solve the labor market disruptions caused by AI.
As AI enters all corners of our world, it should be used as a welcome opportunity to speed up technological innovation in areas where we need it, rather than to inspire more consumerism and warfare. The focus should be on what could be framed as ‘Environmentally Ethical AI’, including energy efficiency, smarter grid systems, renewable energy storage, sustainable land use, streamlining agricultural inputs and yields to limit food loss, etc. Only imagination limits the use cases for the positive applications of AI.
What little growth we can afford on this planet should therefore go into applying AI to solve the real problems we face. In doing so, we should ensure that Environmentally Ethical AI is incentivized and that any AI use case that damages the biosphere is heavily taxed.
Moreover, we need to actively steer AI to be a central piece for solutions for the already unfolding catastrophe of climate change instead of letting it be yet another piece for the capitalist growth dynamics. The degrowth path is daunting to depart on for nation states as we are standing in an increasingly difficult geopolitical situation. The geopolitical situation is nonetheless intertwined with our response to the climate crisis and the incentive for finding a trajectory towards a livable future should be rather considerable given the stakes.
The answer needs to be implementation of structural changes for a degrowth future, and we should use AI as the storm for altering our scary outlook. A superior intelligence to humans, like an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), might judge the human species hard if we fail to change course.
