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Technology that “empowers the individual” can threaten all of us

December 6, 2021

Technology that “empowers the individual” can threaten all of us

Whenever I hear about a new technology that “empowers the individual,” I know that one thing is likely to be true about it:  It will soon (if not already) be turned to negative and harmful ends. And yet, we as a society keep falling for the line that somehow every new technology will give us more control over our lives and make us somehow happier, more connected, safer and more powerful (but only in a good way).

It’s true that practically any technology can be turned toward harmful ends; we haven’t banned knives because they are used both to cut food and kill people. But it is the scale of damage that can be done by an individual that is changing.

Newspaper columnist Molly Ivins used to joke that she was not anti-gun, but pro-knife. In a 1993 column she wrote:

In the first place, you have catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We’d turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don’t ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.

Ivins was getting at the increased scale of damage that can be done by, say, automatic weapons versus a knife.

Guns have been around for centuries and have been made more lethal over time. But their lethality may someday soon seem quaint given the future of “empowerment” that awaits us.

I start with unmanned aerial vehicles which are more familiar to us as drones. Their initial use case was actually as toys, remote-controlled model airplanes for which there remains robust demand among hobbyists. How innocent all that seems compared to the killer drones now deployed by militaries around the world! …

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Degrowth–the promising climate change strategy no politician wants to handle

November 24, 2021

Degrowth – the promising climate change strategy no politician wants to handle?

 

Limitarians and Cornucopians: what Surprises from Technological Progress?

November 16, 2021

Limitarians and Cornucopians: what Surprises from Technological Progress?

Resource depletion, ecosystem disruption, population growth, and technological change are interacting with each other in a tsunami of changes that always take us by surprise. The surprises that technological progress may be bringing are among the most unpredictable drivers of change. Yet, it is not impossible to reason about how our society could be transformed by some disruptive technological innovations. Here, Luca Pardi discusses the most recent report by “RethinkX,” a group of remarkably sharp and creative people. They are hard to define as “pessimists” or “optimists,” but they surely understand that change is unavoidable. 

*****

The debate among limitarians (Robeyns, 2017) and cornucopians is periodically morphing into that among doomsters and optimist-utopians. The limitarians have a generally gloomy view about the future availability of resources while the cornucopians tend to believe that shortages, always possible for many reasons in the short run, were proved not to be a problem in the past, so will not be in the future, at least in the long run. Doomsters-limitarians are also pessimistic about the environmental crisis and its paradigmatic representation: the climate change predicament. Optimists retort that the problem is amplified by anti-capitalistic ideological views and that a combination of technology and local and global policies will draw us, as has always been the case in history, out of dire straits. And the debate goes on forever!

There is a Think Tank named RethinkX that tries to be above or, better, ahead of this ideological deadlock. They are both: doomsters and optimists with a strong slant toward technological disruptive innovations. In a crescendo of techno-optimistic hypes they reach a climax in their last document Rethinking Humanity where they envisage that:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

WEIRD – Thinking Beyond Technology: Issue no.5, “Research for the End of Your ‘Normal’ Everyday Existence”

November 14, 2021

WEIRD – Thinking Beyond Technology: Issue no.5, “Research for the End of Your ‘Normal’ Everyday Existence”

☮ ‘Introduction’
Introducing the science for the end of your ‘normal’ everyday existence.
☮ History file: Bill Devall – ‘The Deep Ecology Movement’
Published in 1980, this tract was the first to outline the split between ‘eco-reformers’ & ‘deep ecologists’.
References:

☮ “It’s the economy, stoooopid!”
Environmentalism uses tech. as a sticking plaster; research says it’s affluence.
References:

☮ ‘Are humans a virus?’
In these times of disruptive pandemic, it might be interesting to figure how all other life on Earth looks at us.
References:

☮ “…a felt need for increased efficiency”
The fatal flaw at the heart of the mainstream debate over efficiency and ecological impact – the ‘rebound effect’.
References:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The case for … making low-tech ‘dumb’ cities instead of ‘smart’ ones

November 6, 2021

The case for … making low-tech ‘dumb’ cities instead of ‘smart’ ones

The Ma’dan people in Iraq weave buildings and floating islands from reeds.
The Ma’dan people in Iraq weave buildings and floating islands from reeds. Photograph: Esme Allen/TSPL

High-tech smart cities promise efficiency by monitoring everything from bins to bridges. But what if we ditched the data and embraced ancient technology instead?

Ever since smartphones hooked us with their limitless possibilities and dopamine hits, mayors and city bureaucrats can’t get enough of the notion of smart-washing their cities. It makes them sound dynamic and attractive to business. What’s not to love about whizzkids streamlining your responsibilities for running services, optimising efficiency and keeping citizens safe into a bunch of fun apps?

There’s no concrete definition of a smart city, but high-tech versions promise to use cameras and sensors to monitor everyone and everything, from bins to bridges, and use the resulting data to help the city run smoothly. One high-profile proposal by Google’s sister company, Sidewalk Labs, to give 12 acres of Toronto a smart makeover is facing a massive backlash. In September, an independent report called the plans “frustratingly abstract”; in turn US tech investor Roger McNamee warned Google can’t be trusted with such data, calling the project “surveillance capitalism”.

There are practical considerations, too, as Shoshanna Saxe of the University of Toronto has highlighted. Smart cities, she wrote in the New York Times in July, “will be exceedingly complex to manage, with all sorts of unpredictable vulnerabilities”. Tech products age fast: what happens when the sensors fail? And can cities afford expensive new teams of tech staff, as well as keeping the ground workers they’ll still need? “If smart data identifies a road that needs paving,” she writes, “it still needs people to show up with asphalt and a steamroller.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tech Won’t Save Us. Shrinking Consumption Will

November 4, 2021

Tech Won’t Save Us. Shrinking Consumption Will

Beyond the ‘blah blah blah’ of climate summits lies the real solution our leaders refuse to acknowledge. First of two parts.

GlobeShoppingCartGraphic.jpg
Oversold: Forget carbon storage, direct air capture, hydrogen power and the Earth relentlessly mined to support ‘green tech.’ Image from Shutterstock.

Since 1995 there have been 25 global conferences on climate change. At every one our so-called political leaders have kicked the can down the road and sung from a bright green hymnbook.

Greta Thunberg has disparaged the refrain as nothing more than “blah, blah, blah.”

She is right of course. Blah, blah blah has kept emissions rising, along with energy spending and its twin sibling unbridled economic growth.

Blah, blah blah has become the standard substitute for the conversation that needs to occur at global conferences and in every public venue: how to shrink the economy and beat a sustainable retreat?

And how do we do that without unhinging a highly complex society that is already teetering on the verge of collapse due to overconsumption of everything?

The notion of shrinking the economy isn’t as medieval as you might think, given the enormous waste of our high-tech and high energy civilization. The existing system contains so much slack and fat that we could easily reduce our energy spending to levels common in the 1960s and 1970s. That wasn’t exactly the Dark Ages. (More on why this is possible, what stands in the way, and how to get there, in a second piece tomorrow.)

Of course such a conversation is considered impossible by our leaders who are ruled by the mantra of growth and short-term election hurdles.

So in Canada, the world’s fourth largest oil exporting nation, the blah blah blah refrain gets louder by the day. We want our emissions and our green cake, too.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Net zero policies are ’emperor’s new clothes,’ academics warn

October 27, 2021

Net zero policies are ’emperor’s new clothes,’ academics warn

factory pollution
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Net zero targets are a “fantasy” that often just protect “business as usual,” a leading expert in environment and sustainability has said.

Dr. James Dyke, Assistant Director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, criticized net zero targets as a “great idea in principle” but which “help perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminish the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.”

The excoriating critique is published in “Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis,” a new essay volume on the  featuring prominent social scientists and humanities scholars from around the world, co-edited by the University of Exeter Business School’s Professor Steffen Boehm.

In a chapter titled “Why net zero policies do more harm than good,” Dr. Dyke and his co-authors Dr. Wolfgang Knorr and Professor Sir Robert Watson argue that the discourse around net zero hinges on deploying potentially dangerous ‘fairytale’ technologies such as carbon capture.

Their essay looks at how projecting a future with more trees was first used by the US to “in effect offset the burning of coal, oil and gas now.”

They go on to argue that the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degree Celsius emissions target allowed “untested carbon dioxide removal mechanisms” to be included in climate-economic modeling.

They describe Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) as a “savior technology,” saying “the mere prospect of  and storage gave policy makers a way out of making the much-needed immediate cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.”

The authors say: “It has been estimated that BECCS could demand an area of land approaching twice the size of India. How will that be achieved at the same time as feeding eight to 10 billion people around the middle of the century, or without destroying native vegetation and biodiversity?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Feynman’s Law writ large

October 14, 2021

Feynman’s Law writ large

Elizabeth Holmes, Chairman and CEO of Theranos, is a living archetype for the modern age.  Lauded by upmarket glossy magazines and heralded as a symbol of modern feminism, Holmes was the world’s first female tech billionaire.  In the tradition of Apple’s Steve Jobs and Tesla’s Elon Musk, Holmes was a driven individual determined to push aside the bureaucrats and naysayers who stand in the way of progress.  A university drop-out with no background in medicine nor tech, Holmes convinced some of America’s most powerful men – including Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and Bill Clinton – that she had succeeded where thousands had failed in developing a Star Trek-type non-invasive blood testing technology.  But Holmes was closer to Elon Musk than to Steve Jobs, in that, like Musk’s hyperloops, solar roofs and Martian colonies, Holmes’ blood testing technology was a work of fantasy.  Unlike Musk – so far at least – Holmes is currently on trial for fraud and faces up to twenty years in jail if convicted.

My interest here is less to do with Holmes so much as with the technicians and engineers who she employed to work on the development of a technology which all of them must have known could never work.  Nevertheless, almost all of them continued to take their monthly salary in exchange for long hours and considerable effort which they knew could never pay off.  John Michael Greer offers a plausible explanation for why this occurred:

“Crackpot realism is one of the downsides of the division of labor. It emerges reliably whenever two conditions are in effect. The first condition is that the task of choosing goals for an activity is assigned to one group of people and the task of finding means to achieve those goals is left to a different group of people…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Solar Energy on the Frontlines and Old-Fashioned Clotheslines

October 10, 2021

Solar Energy on the Frontlines and Old-Fashioned Clotheslines

Solar energy comes to Earthlings in many ways. Ancient Persians used passive solar architecture. East Africans about the same time funneled cool ocean wind through tunnels to cool themselves.

Now at long last, solar energy is outpacing new fossil fuel and nuclear facilities on price, environmental safety, and speed of installation.

One use of solar that has not received enough attention is drying clothes with clotheslines or clothes racks. Before global warming and our climate crisis became a public concern, some local governments banned backyard clotheslines as community eyesores. Fortunately, 20 states have passed “Right to Dry Laws” that allow people to use this simple low-tech and appropriate technology to reduce fuel consumption.

A big booster of hang-drying your laundry is environmentalist Joe Wachunas from Portland, Oregon. Twenty years ago, while traveling as an exchange student in Italy, he learned that only three percent of Italian households owned a dryer. Italians, he noticed, dried their clothes on clotheslines, high-rise balconies, or in open windows catching sun and cross breezes.

Wachunas has competed against dryers, taking only eight minutes longer to hang up a load of clothes than it takes to load a dryer, (not to mention a trip to and from a laundromat). Also, by line-drying, he estimates a savings of $600 a year per family, and your air-dried materials will last longer and shrink less.

As you might think, the great majority of people in the US use a clothes dryer. About 80 percent of Americans use dryers that gobble up more electricity in a household than other appliances (except for refrigerators). These folks will find moving to clean and green drying has many benefits.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Banks Around World Are Suffering Big Outages, Leaving Millions of Customers in Lurch At Worst Possible Time

October 1, 2021

Banks Around World Are Suffering Big Outages, Leaving Millions of Customers in Lurch At Worst Possible Time

Twenty banks (some suffering repeated outages), six countries (one in lockdown), five continents, tens of millions of unhappy customers.

There’s never a good time for your bank’s IT system to go down. But few can be worse than in the middle of a lockdown. It’s difficult to leave home, your local branch may not be open, and as a result you are more reliant than ever on digital banking services. In New Zealand, now in its seventh week of nationwide lockdown, one of the country’s largest lenders, Kiwibank, went down on Tuesday, leaving many of its customers in the lurch. It is one of a string of IT outages the bank has suffered over the past three weeks, after a DDoS attack on New Zealand’s third largest Internet provider caused IT crashes at a number of lenders, including Commonwealth Bank and Anz Bank.

In a DDoS attack hackers overwhelm a site by getting huge numbers of bots to connect to it all at once, rendering it inaccessible. Servers are not breached, data is not stolen but it can still cause plenty of disruption.

24 Million Unhappy Customers

New Zealand is not the only country to have suffered major outages within its banking system in recent weeks. Other countries include the UK, Japan, South Africa, Venezuela and Mexico, though there are no doubt more (if you know of any, It would be great if you could provide details in the comments section).

On September 12, operating failures at Mexico’s largest bank, BBVA Mexico, left 24 million account holders unable to use the bank’s 13,000 ATMs, its mobile app or in-store payments for almost 20 hours. It being a Sunday, customers could not even avail of the lender’s in-branch cash services.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap

September 26, 2021

Sometimes realisation comes in a blinding flash. Blurred outlines snap into shape and suddenly it all makes sense. Underneath such revelations is typically a much slower-dawning process. Doubts at the back of the mind grow. The sense of confusion that things cannot be made to fit together increases until something clicks. Or perhaps snaps.

Collectively we three authors of this article must have spent more than 80 years thinking about climate change. Why has it taken us so long to speak out about the obvious dangers of the concept of net zero? In our defence, the premise of net zero is deceptively simple – and we admit that it deceived us.

The threats of climate change are the direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it follows that we must stop emitting more and even remove some of it. This idea is central to the world’s current plan to avoid catastrophe. In fact, there are many suggestions as to how to actually do this, from mass tree planting, to high tech direct air capture devices that suck out carbon dioxide from the air.

The current consensus is that if we deploy these and other so-called “carbon dioxide removal” techniques at the same time as reducing our burning of fossil fuels, we can more rapidly halt global warming. Hopefully around the middle of this century we will achieve “net zero”. This is the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere.

Climeworks factory with tractor in foreground.
A facility for capturing carbon dioxide from air on the roof of a waste incinerating plant in Hinwil, Switzerland July 18, 2017. This is one of the handful of demonstrator projects currently in operation. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why is Promoting Technology NOT Good?

September 25, 2021

Why is Promoting Technology NOT Good?

Recently I wrote this in one of the groups I manage after reading several comments from members who clearly did not understand the facts behind several of my posts, quote:

“I think it is important to point out why promoting technology is NOT a good thing. First of all, technological devices DO NOT reduce emissions, period. They RAISE emissions. For those who do not understand this, please look up Jevons Paradox [Tim Garrett explains Jevons Paradox and Civilizational Inertia here]. Secondly, one cannot help reduce the effects of climate change without reducing the effects of ecological overshoot. Ecological overshoot is CAUSED by technology use. More technology use = more ecological overshoot, and since ecological overshoot is what causes climate change, using more technology only makes climate change WORSE, not better. So, please take this into mind before promoting the very thing that has brought us to this point in time. One might as well promote arsenic as a health aid…“
Now, in order to understand WHY ecological overshoot is caused by technology use, one must first understand the concepts I highlighted in my first article, Problems, Predicaments, and Technology. Surprisingly to me, and despite all the information I had put out in these groups, those invested in their worldviews continue to buy into the fairy tales that the industrialists tell us. Of course, this is to be expected. While I am used to this type of denial, I was unprepared for the passion to which these folks get riled up with.
Speaking of ecological overshoot, an excellent post from Alice Friedemann showed up while I was busy writing this about why the political process is so slow to respond to the ecological crisis. Written by Rex Weyler, it points out precisely how, quote:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Fantasy of Electrification

September 3, 2021

The Fantasy of Electrification

Recently, I have come across literally hundreds of people defending EVs, their batteries, and electricity generation of all flavors. Of course, this is all fine and dandy, as I am used to the typical arguments in favor of technology of all stripes and often simply post my article about Problems, Predicaments, and Technology, highlighting the connection between the three.

But what concerns me most is that despite all the information available here on my blog and in so many other credible sources of science claiming the exact same things, even intelligent people are ignoring this science in favor of their own beliefs. Folks, BELIEFS DO NOT ECLIPSE FACTS, it is actually the other way around. When the facts do not agree with your beliefs, your beliefs are rendered entirely irrelevant. You can still choose to believe them, but those are called “false beliefs” and they ONLY exist in your mind; not in reality. Examine this commonly mentioned statement; “You made me laugh!” Did this occur in reality? No, of course not. You didn’t “make” me laugh, I CHOSE to laugh. You lack agency to “make” me do ANYTHING. I must CHOOSE to laugh or to take any other action. I can choose to take no action as well. So, when people choose beliefs over facts when the two of them disagree, they are choosing denial; cognitive dissonance, over reality.

This is a very important psychological effect to comprehend so that one can see if he or she is allowing denial to overcome his or her ability to learn new facts. A mind is much like a parachute, it only works when it is open.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More Cognitive Dissonance, Part Two

August 20, 2021

More Cognitive Dissonance, Part Two

It is truly saddening to see so many articles which proclaim complete nonsense. The worst part is that so many people are culturally indoctrinated to the point where they cannot see through these false claims. In this particular one, the claim is made that we need to protect nature (true), quote:

“Our five breakthroughs for nature echo and expand upon those same themes, emphasizing the urgent need to transform our relationship to the natural world on which we ultimately all depend. In a nutshell, here is the handful of headline actions that we are advocating:

  • We need to put nature at the heart of decision-making, with governments and the private sector held accountable for making nature a global priority.
  • An annual investment of US$500 billion to protect and restore nature is a minimum requirement, with funding diverted from environmentally harmful activities into nature-positive initiatives.
  • The communities and local organizations working on the front line of conservation are the ones best placed to address the interrelated biodiversity and climate crises through action at local level, but they need far more support.
  • Safeguarding nature is crucial to climate stability and human health, and we need to redouble our efforts to halt the destruction and degradation of these vital life-support systems.
  • For far too long, advances in technology have worked to the detriment of nature, but they have enormous untapped potential to support its conservation. Technological innovation is not a silver bullet—and needs to go hand in hand with drastic emissions cuts—but it’s a vital weapon in our armory.“
The first four ideas I really liked. They make good sense and would definitely help if put into action. The trouble is that the last idea completely wipes out the entire list…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the Economy Has to Radically Transform to End Fossil Fuels in 20 Years

August 19, 2021

How the Economy Has to Radically Transform to End Fossil Fuels in 20 Years

Coming disruptions will eventually lay waste to conventional jobs in incumbent fossil fuel, combustion engine, and livestock farming industries.
GettyImages-1052523172
IMAGE: MARCEL KUSCH/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES

To avoid the worst of climate change’s disastrous effects, humanity needs to slash carbon emissions and remove carbon from the atmosphere at a pace and scale often said to be eye-wateringly difficult, expensive, and even unlikely given the continued failure of political will. That’s the implication of the IPCC’s report, published this week, which concludes that a 1.5 degrees Celsius rise in global average temperatures is now inevitable in 20 years.

The IPCC’s “best-case” scenario concludes that if we act fast, we might be able to gradually reduce temperatures back down to 1.4C by 2100. Yet this would keep us in the 1.5C climate danger zone for decades, which could risk triggering tipping points that could lead to irreversible and even more dangerous shifts in the climate system. Against this background, the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill has offered a watered down set of policies that simply won’t contribute to the scale of change required.

But a new report by technology forecasting think-tank RethinkX finds that the scope for change could be far larger and faster than either the IPCC or powerful governments like the United States realise: because the most powerful fossil fuel-based industries in the world—oil, gas, and coal; livestock farming; and combustion engines—are going to become obsolete purely due to extant economic factors well within the next 20 years. According to RethinkX, they are being increasingly disrupted by a cluster of clean technologies in the energy, transport and food sectors, which are rapidly becoming cheaper, more efficient, and as a result, more ubiquitous.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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