Humanity is in a trillion-dollar arms race, struggling to choose survival over self-destruction, writes Mark Beeson.
POLITICAL LEADERS, especially the democratic variety, are often criticised for their inability to look beyond the next election. The one great exception to this unfortunate pattern is "national security", which is always defined in terms of comparative military capabilities and always ruinously expensive. As the ill-starred AUKUS project reminds us, the exception doesn’t inspire confidence in the rule.
But what if we looked backwards for inspiration rather than forwards? Getting a stronger sense of the context in which our collective destiny is unfolding might provide a useful reminder of the nature of nature and the very material challenges we face.
It’s not necessary to go back to the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago for this to be an interesting and illuminating exercise, but as unresolved mysteries go, it’s still a doozy. I’m not expecting our Prime Minister to explain what caused the Big Bang or why we are part of a cosmos that is apparently still expanding at 73 kilometres per second. But I think it’s worth knowing that by the time you’ve finished reading this, we’ll all have travelled about 20,000 kilometres. Puts the daily commute in perspective.
Our leaders will understandably be more interested in recent history, but time, as Einstein famously pointed out, is all a bit relative. However, the important time frame for us is "only" 3-4 billion years ago when life began on Earth. Human ancestors started to appear around seven million years ago, but the development of agriculture and "civilisation" began incredibly recently: a mere 1,200 years ago.
Our development as the world’s dominant life form has only gathered pace ever since. Since we became conscious and able to think, there’s been no stopping us. Whether the equally rapid expansion of the human population should be judged as a measure of our success as a species or an indicator of the limits of our ability to act collectively in an environmentally or even politically sustainable manner is another question, but not one that’s asked as often as we might hope or expect.
What we can say is that some of the most profound historical changes that have shaped contemporary reality have not been the carefully considered product of enlightened leadership. On the contrary, the rise of nation-states, the development of capitalism, and the industrial revolution have all been the product of experimentation and the evolution of patterns of social behaviour that favoured some outcomes over others.
The question that emerges from a sense of our remarkable, shared and collectively determined history is: are we any better placed to consciously shape a sustainable future for coming generations than we have been in the past?
The evidence is not encouraging. "Exhibit A" is our collective inability to stop killing other people who look or act differently, have things we want, or have different beliefs about the origins of the universe and the possible point of human existence in the subsequent period.
No doubt it was ever thus. Suffering does seem to be baked into the human experience and, as British economist John Keynes famously reminded us, in the long run we’re all dead. And yet there have been relatively uninterrupted periods of relative peace and prosperity, especially in places like Australia. True, they may have been as much a product of luck as good judgement, but they do suggest that progress is possible and not just the material variety either.
There are still optimists who think that it’s still possible if, as Barack Obama famously suggested, we simply stop doing stupid shit. Perhaps I’m hopelessly naive, but spending less on armaments and more on global climate change mitigation might be an obvious place to reconsider our priorities, all other things being equal.
Unfortunately, things are notoriously unequal. Not only is wealth increasingly concentrated, but so, too, is the capacity to make the choices that will define our collective future. For example, it is estimated that investment in AI might exceed US$2 trillion (AU$2.8 trillion) by 2026. Not only will this money be unavailable for other things, but data centres will likely double the demand for electricity wherever they appear.
But given that AI is likely to be smarter than us soon, perhaps it will recognise the historical pathway that has led to both its creation and the parlous state of the natural and economic environment in which it is becoming such a conspicuous part. Perhaps it will figure out how to "save the planet", too. Who knows, perhaps AI’s the next step in a long-running evolutionary process.
Whatever the answer to such questions, history suggests that human beings aren’t likely to come up with a carefully considered, future-oriented collective response to a rapidly changing world. The most consequential historical change in this regard is our unprecedented capacity to blow ourselves to pieces, by accident or intent.
Perhaps AI will sort that out, too. Let’s hope it doesn’t think we are the recurring problem that needs to be eliminated. Don’t worry either way: the cosmos, of which we are an infinitesimally small part, will carry on expanding without us, either way.
Mark Beeson is an adjunct professor at the University of Technology Sydney and Griffith University. He was previously Professor of International Politics at the University of Western Australia.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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