The speed of global events affecting Planet Earth is faster today than at any time in history. This world has been in existence for 4.5 billion years; the ancestors of human beings have been evolving for six million years, though Homo sapiens has been around for a mere 200,000 years. The agricultural revolution took place 12,000 years ago; cities were first recorded in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq, Turkey and Syria) 7,500 years ago, and Greek philosophy appeared in 600 BC. Roman civilization spanned from 625 BC to 476 AD, followed by the Byzantine Empire which lasted until 1453. The Ottoman Empire lasted from the fourteenth century till 1923, and the British Empire from the 16th century to the 20th century, declining rapidly after the second world war. It was replaced by the USA as the dominant world power.
Throughout the centuries humanity moved rather slowly with its development being limited to the power of animals such as oxen, camels and horses. Things began to speed up in the age of steam, then came a relatively rapid increase in human development due to electricity, the electric light bulb and the telegraph. The advent of the internal combustion engine, fed by the abundant resources of fossil fuels, gave us another push forwards, but the arrival of the internet and the present-day digital age has caused an explosion in the rate of human development. Just when we thought things could not move any faster, we have witnessed the arrival of artificial intelligence which can now write a research paper in seconds, compared to what human beings could produce in weeks.
But there has been a cost to this rapid development. The use of fossil fuels has resulted in huge amounts of carbon being taken out of the ground, either in the form of coal or hydrocarbons and released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The result of the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been a gradual increase in average temperatures, causing extremes in weather patterns. The scenario of global warming was first predicted in the 1970s, and the first World Climate Conference was held as far back as 1979. However, the vested big business interests of oil and gas developed a strategy to create doubt about the validity of global warming. They were very successful in their campaign of mis-information, resulting in little action being taken for half a century.
Over the past decade climate change has become a reality, and recently many governments have set targets to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, but it seems to be too little too late. Extremes of weather are now the order of the day, with Uganda being no exception. The same scenario of big business casting doubt on scientific evidence was used by the tobacco companies when confronted with evidence that nicotine was addictive and smoking caused cancer. Some of the same people who worked for the tobacco companies were enrolled by the oil companies
One big personality who has led the charge against our dependency on fossil fuels is Elon Musk. Tesla was at first the butt of jokes among the big automobile manufacturers but has become the major force in the development of electric vehicles. Musk was also involved in the founding of the company ‘Open AI’ which developed Chat GPT but has been vociferous in warning on the dangers of artificial intelligence. The development of what is known as large language models as a training source for AI has led to an exponential increase in the speed of development of AI – to the point that human beings no longer even understand how AI works. There are those who scoff at the thought of AI ever being more intelligent than huma beings, but it has already surpassed us and understands our weaknesses. In the same way that we have domesticated animals, AI could end up domesticating us – using us for what is useful or eliminating us when our usefulness is at an end. There are many digital addictions which can be created for human beings, which the current debate on TikTok illustrates. A superior intelligence can understand us better than we understand ourselves and can mine our weaknesses so that we come under its control.
Human beings face an uncertain future – we could destroy our fragile environment and make earth uninhabitable, or we might become slaves to a superior intelligence. On both these issues we need to take action and we need to take it now. Carbon emissions must be replaced by carbon sequestration, and the companies developing AI must be regulated.
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