Artificial Intelligence vs Human Wisdom

Trump, Starmer, and the trashing of nature

Donald Trump’s flurry of Executive Orders, so soon after his inauguration, certainly demonstrated what he thinks will make America great again, as well as the speed with which he intends to achieve that greatness. A couple of the Executive Orders, on Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to Federal Government and on Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, mark a significant move away from the Obama and Biden administrations’ denial of biological reality and active promotion of medical procedures that harm children. There are limits to what these Executive Orders can achieve, as they apply only to Federal government and don’t affect State governments or the private sector, and it may be that their renunciation of gender ideology represents little more than awareness of how damaging this issue was to the Democrat vote in the November election. These Executive Orders do, though, challenge the gender industry’s normalisation of its assault on humanity. And they encourage recognition of material reality, at least when this is perceived as politically advantageous.

Other Executive Orders take the opposite direction, though, by denying the material reality of climate breakdown and wildlife extermination. Apparently building on his oft-stated belief that climate change is a ‘hoax’, many of Trump’s Executive Orders dismantle nature protections and scrap policies that reduce carbon emissions. One of these Executive Orders, Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential, does little to hide the fact that what it unleashes is the destruction of Arctic wildlife in order to extract oil and Liquefied Natural Gas.

This trashing of nature doesn’t simply reflect an acceptance of conspiracy theories about climate change. It is integral to a political strategy of reasserting US dominance through monopolisation of Artificial Intelligence. One of the Executive Orders focuses on Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence. This followed the launch of Stargate, a joint venture with OpenAI and Oracle that aims to invest $500 billion into AI infrastructure in the US,. Another Executive Order, Declaring a National Energy Emergency, recognises that “a high demand for energy and natural resources to power the next generation of technology” will overwhelm the electricity grid. It calls for urgent action to support “the United States’ ability to remain in the forefront of technological innovation.” There’s a clear thread that links a desire for world domination in Artificial Intelligence, a recognition that its demand for electricity will far outstrip current supply, and trashing nature and drilling for fossil fuels to meet that demand.

It didn’t take long for the dream of US supremacy in AI to hit up against the reality of Chinese innovation. A week after the Executive Order declaring an Energy Emergency, a Chinese firm, DeepSeek, released R1, an open source large language model that performs as well as Chat GPT at a fraction of the cost. The share values of US tech companies slumped. The assumption that Chinese firms could only copy, not innovate, had been shattered. It was, Marc Andreessen suggested, “AI’s sputnik moment.” The fact that DeepSeek’s AI could operate at a fraction of the energy cost of American tech’s AI seemed to throw into question the whole economic strategy of the second Trump presidency.

Tech company share prices have seen a partial recovery since the 27 January collapse. Trump has described DeepSeek’s innovation as a “wake up call” fo US tech. Some commentators take comfort in a belief that DeepSeek’s success was based on the stockpiling of US-sourced computer chips before export controls were introduced. Others remind investors of the Jevons paradox, pointing out that reduced costs will stimulate a massive increase in demand. There’s no doubt, though, that confidence in American greatness being achieved by massive investment in AI and drilling for fossil fuels has taken a huge knock.

Making Britain great again?

It’s now more than half a year since Keir Starmer became the UK’s Prime Minister, Many of his policies follow a similar direction to those of Trump, though they are being introduced at a much slower pace. Like Trump, Starmer has seen how damaged the US Democrats were by their unthinking adherence to gender ideology, and his government has made a half-hearted attempt to cut back on the chemical and surgical mutilation of children. Like Trump, economic growth is his main mission, and promotion of AI is his main way of achieving it, though it was 6 months before he launched the Action Plan that he claimed would make Britain “an AI superpower”.

The main difference between Starmer and Trump is that whereas Trump believes climate change is a hoax, Starmer accepts that it is real. The difference in practice may not be all that great, because Starmer doesn’t acknowledge that prioritising growth, particularly growth that is centred on AI, makes a low carbon economy harder to achieve. Even the low-hanging fruit of 95% clean electricity by 2030 becomes more of a challenge when the massive extra demand of the promised data centres is factored in.

Like Trump, Starmer sees wildlife and nature as obstacles to his growth mission. As he so often reminds us, he supports “builders not blockers.” And the blockers he most frequently references are the planning rules that protect wildlife and habitats, and the people who stand up for them. It’s visceral. “I hate tree huggers”, he told the shadow cabinet back in July 2023.

Earlier this week Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves told assembled industrialists that Starmer had discussed “the vital importance of growth” in his phone call with President Trump last weekend. She stressed that business in the UK will no longer be held back by restrictive regulation, and that developers can now “focus on getting things built, and stop worrying about bats and newts.” She went on to suggest that this would remove barriers to developments like the area between Oxford and Cambridge becoming “Europe’s Silicon Valley” (despite knowing that her fiscal rules would prevent the sort of state investment that was crucial to shaping California’s Silicon Valley). She demonstrated her dismissal of the climate emergency by supporting construction of a third runway for London’s Heathrow airport. She’s fully aware that its boost to global warming would not be reduced by ‘sustainable aviation fuels’ that don’t yet exist, and that the damage would be disguised by the exclusion of international aviation from national calculations of carbon emissions.

Whereas Trump felt able to trash wildlife protection merely by stating that nothing must stand in the way of growth, the Starmer government still feels the need to make some token gesture to downplay damage to nature. Instead of having to identify harm to protected habitats and species and mitigate any damage locally, developers will, in future, simply have to pay for what they destroy. Their payments will be pooled in a Nature Restoration Fund, and spent on strategic nature recovery projects, located far away from the developments that have paid up. Beside the obvious harm to the sacrificed bats and newts, humans will be deprived of the mental and physical wellbeing that comes from connection to nature close to where they live and work.

Japanese knotweed

Starmer made full use of inappropriate nature metaphors in a Times article highlighting the policy initiatives set out by Rachel Reeves. A “morass of regulation”, he suggested, was stopping an inflow of investment. “Thickets of red tape” had been allowed to spread through the economy “like Japanese knotweed.” His government will “clear out the regulatory weeds”, and economic stability is already “bearing fruit” and attracting long-term investment.

He got it very wrong. Japanese knotweed is an invasive perennial that was introduced to the UK in the nineteenth century as an ornamental garden plant. Once introduced, it outcompeted native plants, reducing species diversity. It is incredibly difficult to eradicate.

Japanese knotweed does not work as a metaphor for measures that protect habitats and species, and promote biodiversity. As a metaphor, it applies more to the growth that he worships - a policy that is attractive at first sight, but which, if unchecked, changes land use in a way that systematically reduces biodiversity, encourages species extinction, and threatens planetary breakdown.

Silicon Valley’s AI enthusiasts are unconcerned about how AI and growth violate natural boundaries. Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto asserts that “Artificial Intelligence is best thought of as a universal problem solver”. He goes on to claim, without any evidence to back it, that “our planet is dramatically underpopulated … the global population can easily expand to 50 billion people or more.” (The current world population is just over 8 billion). Andreessen doesn’t recognise, let alone respect, the existence of other species. Tomas Pueyo presents calculations which, he believes, prove that world population can reach 100 billion, thanks in large part to AI. “Imagine AI managing our vertical farms with nuclear energy in underground facilities”, he writes. “How much food could we produce? As much as we want!” He even allows for some non-human species to survive - they are to be conserved by “corralling them in reserves.”

The more humans become obsessed with growth, and with AI’s role in accelerating it, the more they disconnect from the living planet we inhabit, and the less they value human wisdom and our rootedness in nature. The AI salesmen encourage us to think like machines, to believe that understanding comes from retrieving algorithmically determined information, without any need to evaluate it. For the time being, we can resist that sales pitch. We should distrust those who would let a minimally regulated AI, based as it is on an ability to access huge amounts of data that are controlled by a small number of tech billionaires, determine our future. Particularly when our wisdom knows that the future mapped out for us by the tech billionaires’ algorithmic control would be one of atrophying human brains, increasing economic and social inequality, and accelerating planetary breakdown.