Risk Kills. Will We Ever Learn?

Human civilisations have been jumping off cliffs since the beginning of their existence: we are the most risk-taking species to have lived on Earth, equipped with the most ambitious, careless, imaginative thought processes that evolved as successful survival strategies. We don’t simply take risks: we devise them in our corporate board rooms, execute them in our war command centres, glorify them in our religions and movies, and rationalise them to our children. The terrifying level of risk-taking within our species is seldomly acknowledged because our history books promptly, and quite desperately, always shift the spotlight from the disasters, to the so-called “silver linings”.

But however “calculated” or “heroic” we may think our risks are, they are still, and will always be, huge leaps into the unknown. Risk kills, unless the statistics are on your side. And the statistics of risk have been on our side not for decades or centuries, but for thousands of years. Our civilisations lived in an infinity of abundance where they had an endless number of spare lives to burn through: numerous resources to exhaust, millions of species to drive to extinction, and countless opportunities to miss.

But what happens when abundance ends? When you’ve burned all your candles as we have today? The table of risk statistics turns upside down. We are caught between a climate that is turning into a heat trap, and a new, algorithmic species that does not even break a sweat and will eventually see us as a non-intelligent bug to squash and move on. And yet, our approach is the same it’s always been: to try and risk ourselves out of this situation by hoping that this new species will have mercy on us, and that the overheating planet will just get tired of being hot on its own, and simply give up and cool down. This is not called risk-taking anymore. It is called Darwinian evolution i.e. extinction of the stupidest. We are being terminated by an evolutionary trait that worked wonders for us for a very long time, but is now fast becoming our Achilles heel: our incessant risk taking.

In my interview last week for Climate Chat about my latest book The Biology of Collapse, I was asked “what do you think of the Abundance Movement?” I did a double take, as I first had no idea what they were talking about. Thankfully Dan Miller, the host, explained to me that this is what techno-optimists call themselves now. They believe that they can bring back abundance to the dying human parasite through yet another technological revolution. I guess it’s always possible, but highly unlikely, and incredibly risky. Plus, what is it really that the Abundantists want? 35 billion humans on the planet and barely anything else left standing? If having this many humans is even possible. Their argument is what the argument of techno-illusionists has been for centuries: “we have no other choice. we have to do this”.

I call bull***t. They simply don’t want to see the other choices. There are plenty of them, degrowth being just one.

Risk kills, and our naïve love affair with technology is not only stupid, but incredibly supremacist. This is why, among techno-optimists you are always guaranteed to find a very large concentration of undocumented right-wing enthusiasts, faux-environmentalists, and closeted Elon fanatics. We cannot have these guys in charge of what is potentially the last days of our species.

The Abundance Movement is nothing new actually: it is predatory capitalism dressed up in fibre optic cables and crypto. We’ve been here before, many times. They call it Abundance, I call it techno-illusionism because they believe in magic tricks, and they are selling us another religion, a fairy tale, in fact, probably the very last fairy tale we will ever believe. Snake oil salesmen are great on selling, but lethal once you let them into your house. Because when AGI comes in a few years, we may very well go extinct within a matter of months. And that is a huge risk to take, but it is also probably evolution realising it made a huge booboo and its best to simply end the human experiment altogether. A better species has arrived, anyway. Let’s give this one a try.

Humanity is about to take the biggest, stupidest, and quite possibly last risk it will ever take: the development of beings that are smarter than us. Yet our risk-prone brain tries to rationalise and justify this, as it has done with all previous technologies. It is a tragedy that both progress and disaster are outcomes of the same exact question: “What if?”. What if I go to the moon? What if I invent this cure? What if I make this nuclear bomb? What if I based my entire civilisation on the combustion of fossil fuel?

But how about this new question: “What if we played it safe instead?” How about just trying this for a bit, and see what happens? The Abundance evangelists don’t want to even entertain the thought. It cripples their trillion-worth house of cards. Perhaps it wasn’t risk that I was talking about, after all. Maybe it was greed, growth, White Privilege and capitalism.

Additional reading material:

Technophilia: The Mental Illness Behind Civilisational Collapse

Inside the Mind of an AI. It’s Supremacy Stupid!

A Brief History Of The Human Brain: How We Got It All Wrong

Also this chapter from my book In The Grip of Necrocapitalism: Our Game-Ending Love Affair with Technology

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