Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

In the more innocent time before the pandemic, we already knew that we were living in an era with a new name. We had entered the Anthropocene — a new epoch in which the chief forces shaping nature are the work of our own species. Some date the dawn of the Anthropocene to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, others to 1945 and the detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While we may disagree about when this epoch began, we are beginning to understand, and not a moment too soon, its moral imperative. It requires that humans must assume responsibility for natural phenomena — the weather, sea levels, air quality, soil fertility, species survival, and viruses — that we once left in the hands of God or fate. This is a genuinely momentous alteration in our worldview. We have for centuries boasted of our mastery of nature, but the time has come for Prometheus to shoulder the responsibility that comes with mastery, and to make our mastery wiser. We may be lords and masters of nature, but as philosophers have been telling us, we must learn to master our mastery. It is dawning on us that this so-called mastery could kill us, and not only us. According to what we currently know, a virus leaps from a non-human to a human in a wet market in Wuhan: a tiny entity composed of RNA acid and protein jumps the gap between species, and within eight weeks, thanks to the malign interaction between the global economy and the global biosphere, the entire world was in lock-down, parents and grandparents were dying and the young adults, who came to majority in the new precarious economy, were wondering whether they would ever know economic security again. Naturally enough, the idea of the Anthropocene no longer awakens only a sense of mastery and control, but also a terrible fear. We fear our own powers and their consequences; we fear our world ending, going dark in environmental collapse and plague, followed by that old evil stand-by, barbarism. Ecological pressure has ended other great civilizations: if Easter Island, why not us? If viruses finished off the Mayans, the Incas, the tribes who so innocently greeted Columbus, why not us? The Anthropocene — and the fear that now haunts our mastery of nature — is putting enormous pressure on the whole spectrum of modern political beliefs. Some American progressives accept the ecological facts, but they blame everything on capitalism, demonstrating pattern blindness towards the environmental devastation and public health incompetence in the command economies of Russia, China, and Eastern Europe for two generations after 1945. Ideologically hostile to markets, militant progressives are also giving away significant ameliorative tools such as carbon pricing that may be crucial to any solution to the climate crisis. At the other end of the political spectrum, there are still many conservative parties — Republicans in the United States prominently among them — who are in double denial about the risk to the environment and the risks to human health, vitiating environmental controls on polluting industries and unlocking their local economies before it is safe to do so. Sometimes this know-nothingism derives from a larger hostility to science and objectivity that has emerged from the cultural and political agenda of the American right. It is just possible that the scale of the crisis of the Anthropocene will awaken conservatives from their dogmatic slumbers, because if they do not awaken they will lose the power they live for. (And the eventual catastrophe will hardly be a good business environment.) There are also populists of the right — Salvini, Orban, Wilders — who prefer to change the subject, who tell their voters that the thing to fear is not climate change or pandemics but immigrants and foreigners. But a politics that changes the subject does not have much of a future either. In a host of countries — the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Nordic states — a new politics has been taking shape that identifies climate change as the central political issue of our time and argues, cogently, that species destruction and environmental wastage have rendered us also more vulnerable to pandemics. Before