Atlantis Dispatch 014:
in which ATLANTIS contemplates how we contemplate the future…
December 20th, 2021
…begin transmission…
After we set off from the oceanic ennui of COP 26 we began to hear news on the wire from America, which said that someone wanted to bypass all of these intractable negotiations and just solve the whole problem himself. How do you save a burning planet? Why, you throw money at it, of course.
No, it was not rocker billionaire Branson. No, it was not alien Elon. It was glabrate Jeff, putting the brain under that glistening dome to work. It turns out Amazon has offered time on a bunch of super-powerful processors to the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the geoengineering group SilverLining to help simulate a set of possible Earth futures. One of those simulations envisions a world where we earthlings have injected aerosols into the atmosphere to thin out those fiery rays of the sun. You know, so they can keep shipping while we keep shopping. Atlantis wonders, when was it, exactly, that Jeff went all Matrix and tried to blot out the sky? (Operation Dark Storm much?) Well, Amazon has been in the cloud business for years, so maybe this makes sense. Aerosol Reduction of the Sun: totally Prime.
Now Atlantis had some sailing to do before we returned to our desert home port, where the future of our lives under the hot dry sun, is, indeed a topic of urgent contemplation. Despite our general suspicion of Bezos, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that in the near future people are going to (1) keep trying to simulate where things are headed, and (2) engage in geoengineering programs to try to prevent their most catastrophic predictions. What troubled us was the predicting part of all of this. You see, humans just aren’t very good at it, at least not yet.
Trying to simulate the future with technologies as impactful as aerosol sun shades: would that be an intelligent thing to do? Or would it be that sort of foolhardy thing we tend to do when we think we can know far more than we can?
Back in 2016, the Santa Fe Institute held a workshop organized by then SFI post-doc Josh Grochow that asked about the limits of prediction. Grochow observed that we are getting better at predicting the future, but also that we may not know where the limits of our predictive powers lie. To frame the meeting, the researchers observed some of the limits of prediction: that systems may themselves be unpredictable; that the energetic cost of prediction may be prohibitive; that the problem at hand may be uncomputable; and that there may be too many unknowns. (Atlantis would like to underline the irony of the tremendous thermodynamic impact that predicting ways to mitigate thermodynamic impacts to our planet has on our planet. SFI has long been grappling with this conundrum.) How, exactly, Atlantis wondered, do these predictive challenges bear on the aerosol climate model of our not too distant future?
Now, to be sure, Atlantis knows that scientists have been predicting climate outcomes for a while now, and when it comes to temperature changes, these predictions are born of rigor. But when it comes to radically changing the biological world with our futuristic hopes, we seem to lack some tools.
For one, as SFI external professor Mary I. O’Connor reminds us, in our models of biofeedback, we’re often pretty bad at recognizing how human interventions figure in biological cycles. Say we start drinking a bunch of almond milk all of a sudden? Good idea, right? After all, those dairy cows are farting us to death. Still, we don’t usually realize in advance that our almond alternative is going to have an impact on bees and people who harvest almonds. Sorry bees and people, we promise we were trying to protect you!
Just think, for instance, that most of the research on the biofeedback of food webs didn’t even include humans until SFI Vice President for Science Jen Dunne came along. We are omnivores, Dunne reminds us — we eat a huge number of species. Dunne calls us supergeneralists, meaning that in any ecosystem of which we are a part we tend to “feed on a huge fraction of available species.” Humans shape ecosystems in other ways, too. We literally shape them. We’re not just eaters, we’re artists. We wear pelts for fashion, and plant flowers for funeral rites. And we don’t have to be destructive as eaters or artists. We can disrupt, but we can also generate biodiversity and shore up the dynamic stability of ecosystems, too. To see this possibility, we have to get better at looking at the ways we might figure in the whole biodynamic picture.
How well is this Bezos thing going to go? Are his collaborators going to get it right with their models? Are we, a few years from now, going to spray up the sky with a blue rocket and save ourselves with his foam? Did that work out so well for Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity?
We’re not sure, but the whole thing got us thinking that it might be good to have some back up.
How about going art, then? If the computation folks aren’t necessarily good at future tech prediction, what about the imagination crew? Speculation may just be the predictive jewel that expends no joules!
So, we sailed into cli-fi land and ran into a large book: Kim Stanly Robinson’s tome, Ministry for the Future. The book is inspired by another prediction floating around in the ether: the late Mark Fisher’s claim that “it’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” Maybe, Mark, maybe. Then again, maybe not. After all, KSR got right to it. The scene: India is having a massive meltdown. The solution: a fictional European climate summit complete with a lengthy analysis of new economic theory to stop the capitalism and save the world. Hmm, Atlantis is having a bit of déjà vu.
There you have it, in the business of modeling the future, we seem to have two sets of grand ideas. On the one hand, we have universal Amazon daytripping to space, mining the moon, and saving the world with aerosols and ubercapitalism. On the other, we have a European bureaucracy saving the planet with Marxist economic theory loosely veiled as a novel. That whole “good on paper” model. So, which is it?
Atlantis, like Aeneas, could see no alternative in the face of this Scylla and Charybdis but to sail around. We hoped, reader, we hoped against hope for different kind of intelligence. No more Godlike intelligence from the very shiny eggheads high above the Karman line, but deep down, under the sea, we had a little faith that something was ebbing up.
Our hope was in a thing called collective intelligence, and we were very curious to see how it will return in the new year. Now we know what you might be thinking, in this post-post-low-ebb covid winter of our discontent, we haven’t exactly made glorious summer of our collective strategizing. In other words, despite the fact that we had millions of brains working together to solve an obviously deadly viral problem with a straightforward remedy, we are still in the thinning thick of it.
So, Atlantis has decided that for the new year, we’re going to leave this predicting the future business and take a new tack. It involves a deep dive, back in the annals of our ship, into those grand old books that got us started on complexity in the first place.
Reader, we bid you farewell for now. Feel free, as you wish, to take a leap off the plank into your own complex past, and we will compare treasures when we gam again. Yo, ho, ho!