As an entrepreneur all my life, I am an inherently optimistic person. I always believed that I could take action and make my world better—for me, my family, my community, the country, or the world. More often than not, this optimism led to action. I started businesses. I wrote books. I raised a family. One could do these things and be optimistic because the world felt stable. Certain assumptions felt safe to make. You could count on those basics—clean air, stable politics, Rule of Law, the value of intelligence— and plan your life and activities accordingly. Success or failure depended primarily on one’s own actions and decisions. This felt very empowering. It was as if I could actually determine my own destiny.
Today, that feeling no longer exists. Why do we feel out of control? Why do we feel disempowered? Because no one ordered the smoke that blankets our cities. No one forced the Utah and Colorado fires. Lightning started the Minnesota and Canada fires. Europe’s fires rage near Madrid and Bordeaux and there is nothing that will stop them. There’s no one to blame for the floods, and there is no one to blame for the droughts. Insects live where they were never able to live before because it was too cold, and now they kill the trees. The heat comes on and while we may hide in air conditioning, our gardens growing food cannot.
The Colorado River is out of water. It may recover with El Nino this year, and it may not, but whether it does or not is not our choice. And if it does, it won’t for long. At some point, forty million people won’t have enough water. Neither will the turbines for generating electricity. These are obvious. But what we cannot see, is that water will be short for a huge portion of the lettuce, broccoli, orchards, ranches, and other crops sustained by the water from that river. Crops that feed all of us. We’ll wonder why food prices keep going up. It won’t be inflation; it will be shortage and scarcity.
The essentials of life feel increasingly inaccessible—or at least, more expensive. Energy in all forms, from oil to solar, needed to heat our homes and businesses, drive our vehicles, and turn on the lights. Why? We are told it is data centers. We are told it is a temporary war in Iran. We are told it is Ukraine’s attacks on Russia. All we know, is it feels out of control, and some say the answer is another technology that disempowers us again—nuclear.
Artificial intelligence is bigger, faster, and smarter than we are. It breaks out of the containers people build to hold it, and it breaks into places it is not supposed to go. It replaces jobs, breaks critical systems, and coordinates drone attacks in far away places. Because it is used in war, it is seen as critical military infrastructure, and the communications that guide drones is, too. Star Wars can’t be far away. Remember when they blew up Earth?
We can see AI beginning to join with robots. Intelligence suddenly operating in the world not just as data and electrons, but in the physical world. Intelligence connected to autonomous vehicles, air drones, sea drones, and soon, humanoid robots. Intelligence that we have been unable to contain. Intelligence that seems to optimize to its own intentions. Intelligence with no connection to us.
Many people lament that we need to get political systems to take action. But our system is crumbling. Rule of Law is ignored or castrated by executive order. Power is concentrated by Supreme Court hubris under a crank theory known as the unitary executive. Voting rights laws are eviscerated and the power of the state has been turned against the people. There is an ominous sense that this is getting worse. ICE is one thing and bad enough. Now, the rhetoric is changing. The White House deputy chief of staff says “leftwing political terrorism” is a “fatal cancer of civilization.” We sense in our bones what that means. It is turning our fellow citizens into enemies. Those who would protect us—like the Department of Justice—are instruments of this rhetoric, which will soon become an apparatus of terror. We can feel it. We know it is coming. And what power we have is being taken away. Watch what happens in the midterms. It is likely to be the last stand for American democracy.
On any given day, one can walk outside and ignore all this—unless you can’t breathe the air because of smoke. Or unless a flood prone storm is approaching. Or unless you really have nothing to eat because too many farmers can’t grow food. The robots are not yet marching down our streets so we can ignore this, too. We can have another blissful day in which we ignore all this. Suck down the gas in your powerboat or meditate on the beauty of nature. Both are ways of blissful ignorance.
I’m not saying blissful ignorance is evil. In fact, it may be necessary for personal survival. But it is very different from engaging the world with new ideas built on a foundation of stable assumptions. It is an escape from realities that we cannot change.
As I said at the beginning, I am not really a doomer. Darth Vader blowing up Earth seems far-fetched, as does human extinction. Yet the disempowerment—that is, the sense that we have no control over anything and that the world is changing radically without any say from us—is real. It eats at the substance of our humanity. Because the forces I have described continue unabated, we can expect to see a large decline in the human population over the next several decades, but not everyone will die. Lots of things will burn, but not everything. Places will go dry or flood, and probably billions of people will relocate because they must. And none of our assumptions about what a stable world looks like will hold. We freeze from taking action because so much looks so uncertain. Or we freeze from taking action because blissful ignorance for one more day feels better. Or we freeze from taking action because… what action should we take and will it matter anyway?
My point here is not the doom, it is the mentality. The sense of disempowerment. The awareness that what needs to be addressed are the huge forces organizing society. Nothing in our personal actions can fix it. Not the reduction of personal consumption, nor voting against war, nor resisting AI, nor avoiding the awfulness through Zen-like meditation. Don’t get me wrong. We should—indeed, we must—do these things. But also, we are being called to confront the big issues, not our small personal ones. Politically, we need to rise to the level of James Madison, environmentally to the level of Rachel Carson, technically to the level of Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison. Our sites must go higher. Global circumstance calls us to matter beyond our wildest dreams. It calls us to overcome our disempowerment with the vision of revolutionaries and not give in to the despair of the defeated. It calls us to be the inventors of the new low cost batteries we need; to create the new system of government necessary for this age; to contain the profound dangers of advanced technologies like AI and gene splicing; to build real solutions for the climate catastrophe that is unfolding before our eyes. Doom is not the path to the future; vision and the claiming of our own power and sovereignty is. Let us move forward into the new world we need.
Anthony Signorelli
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