Episodios
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Can we engineer our way out of dystopia?
A.I. technologist Deep Dhillon and I had a heated exchange about technology after meeting by chance in Granada after a flamenco performance. The conversation was fascinating, and I invited him onto the show to discuss what's really going on in Silicon Valley around A.I., what developments are being made and why, and how this technology is going to impact us all.
As a cofounder of Xyonix and host of the podcast, Your A.I. Injection, Deep has decades of experience working on A.I. models in the Valley. He explains his vision for a brighter future facilitated by technology, but equally explains the negative impacts of technology not just on society but on the industry itself which is racing to keep up with its own developments. This is a wide-ranging conversations about systems, tech, the economy and collective responsibility for engineering a better future for us all.
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This week, P:C features Mongabay.
Nations across the globe are trialing “rights of nature” laws and “legal personhood” for various ecosystems and a range of reasons, from Indigenous reconciliation to biodiversity protection. While these two concepts are closely related, they have some key differences.
Viktoria Kahui discusses what distinguishes them and how they’ve been used for conservation, while stressing there’s still little evidence that legal personhood protects biodiversity. Kahui is an environmental and ecological economist at the University of Otago in Aotearoa New Zealand and joins the Mongabay Newscast to interrogate these legal frameworks.
In this conversation with co-host Rachel Donald, Kahui outlines instances where the laws have been applied and why, despite some flaws, she thinks they are worth considering and iterating upon to combat environmental degradation, despite a global debate and many critiques, based on their intent and design. Chief among these is their imposition of an anthropocentric (and primarily Western) legal viewpoint upon something as complex as nature, which transcends the confines of human liability and, therefore, cannot be subjected to it without knock-on effects that potentially harm the people these laws are intended to empower.
Kahui weighs in on this debate and where she sees such laws being applied in a promising fashion, such as in Ecuador, where courts have examined nature in the context of established constitutional law, leading to outcomes that have benefited both people and nature.
“Very slowly, as lawyers and judges are becoming more familiar with the concept, they’re able to interpret it when there is a legal case being brought, and they’re [better able to argue] the side of nature,” she says. “It’s certainly much, much more positive than what we’ve seen in the past.”
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes on the Mongabay website.
Planet: Critical is back to regular programming next week. Stay tuned.
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How has the psychology industry perpetuated the problem?
Steffi Bednarek is a climate psychotherapist working both with clients on their anxiety and depression related to climate grief, and the overarching systems within the psychology profession which stigmatises mental health by failing to grasp that poor mental health can be a rational reaction to a broken world.
Steffi joins me to discuss how the dysfunction of our neoliberal economic system permeates our experience of being in the world, questioning whether health is an attainable goal in a sick society. She suggests the mental health crisis is yet another opportunity to radically transform our systems to promote a health that includes people and planet. We discuss the construct of the self, the metacrisis as a birth process, the role of the body in understanding information, and how to build psychological resilience.
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Remember the adage it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?
Culture inculcates certainties—and only in living against them will we forge new possibilities, says writer Natasha Lennard. Changing the world from the ground up takes time, it takes bravery, it takes collective will to go against. Only power changes fast. But we can live in a world where people—not power—make changes.
In this wonderful discussion on certainty, doubt and reimagining the world, Natasha, author of two books on politics and violence, walks us through how we currently conceptualise crisis and certainty, and how once we have an understanding of that conceptualisation, we can become more aware of how certainties arise from collective meaning making. This is about moving the frontiers of certainty, rejecting things that we think to be certain in order to challenge, experiment, and joyously resist violent norms. This is about how we build a new world—and remember what truly is certain: love, shelter, community, joy.
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What if the solutions are the problem?
Life is made beautiful by the myriad possibilities that evolve—spontaneously—from interactions in the world. A look shared between strangers, a joke passed from customer to barista, a story swapped, a birdsong heard. But these possibilities are diminishing with every tech substitution for interaction. Tech gets in the way.
I'm joined by journalist and founder of Low Tech Magazine, Kris De Decker, to discuss the difference between high tech and low tech; the zealous and unfounded faith in tech crippling our climate decisions; the relationship between tech, finance, economies and state control; and how a low tech lifestyle is liberating. This is a beautiful conversation with someone really walking the walk when it comes to sustainability—and reaping the rewards.
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References: Brett Scott and Altered States of Monetary Consciousness:
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How do we come home to our bodies?
Bayo Akomolafe is a philosopher writer, activist, professor of psychology and executive director of the emergence network. He's the author of 'We Will Tell Our Own Story' and 'These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters To My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home'. Bayo is an extraordinary poet artist, linguistic dancer, who seems to revel at the very edge of thought, holding up fractal mirrors with which we can see ourselves in splendid possibility and wounded reality. He has a way of speaking that invites both the past and the future to pick up the spirit of the present and remind it not to be weighed down by all that it thinks it is.
In this conversation, Bayo talks about the crisis of mastery that we face today: white modernity and the edge of the moral field into which we must dance and play and revolt. He describes cracks as innovation; the pragmatic of the useless; the minor gestures which disrupt; and edge as a place of power. This is a conversation about carnival and bodies, on de-territorialising our senses, on emerging with reality, on relating, and on coming home.
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How can businesses make better decisions?
The corporate world needs new values, values that inspire different motivations for existing. But doing so within the existing framework of driving shareholder value is so complicated that many are claiming it can't be done. Socio-technological ethicist Nate Kinch is trying anyway.
Nate works at the intersection of values and technology, working on redesigning corporate values by focusing on building trust and morality within organisations. We discuss this at length, and whether or not business is capable of designing its own decay or degrowth due to a wider ecological imperative. We also discuss the drivers of this corporate crisis, including the story of separation.
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The global majority are not responsible for global warming.
A tiny percentage of the world's population are in positions of power, making decisions that impact the entire planet. These are the people who own and benefit from the fossil-fuelled means of production. Professor Matt Huber says taking power back from them is a class struggle—and cannot be done without building working class power.
Building on arguments from his book, Climate Change as Class War, Matt says that rather than focusing on elite consumption we should target elite production, making material arguments for systems change that the working class can relate to. He also explains what the professional class of environmentalists fail to grasp about working class voters, why capital ignores public infrastructure, and why a Green New Deal is the only way to combat petro-privatisation.
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The carbon cycle is more dangerous than an asteroid.
An asteroid killed the dinosaurs but unstable carbon cycles caused the worse mass extinctions in earth’s history—and we are putting carbon dioxide into the air at a rate the earth has never seen before.
I’m joined by science journalist Peter Brannen, author of The Ends of the World, to discuss how the carbon cycle has caused five out of the six mass extinction events — with the worst taking 10 million years for the planet to recover. Peter says all the drivers point that we are hurtling towards a sixth mass extinction if we don’t change rapidly change course, an event totally unprecedented in its man-made nature. This is an experiment in planetary systems going horribly wrong. We still have time to stop. If we don’t, the results could change the planet beyond recognition.
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A.I. is here—except it isn't. Or is it?
A.I. is all over the news all of the time, and nations are scrambling to win the race and become the world leaders in this technology which we're told will change the world. This belief, this myth, is driving policy, investment, hype and conferences. It's the myth that is making A.I., a technology which has consistenly been over-promised and failed to deliver.
Yet, nobody is asking if we want the changes we're told A.I. will deliver. The assumption is the future will be artificially intelligent. This means that other critical problems are falling off the agenda which is now dominated by the race towards a hyper-technological future—no matter the costs. Researcher Paul Schütze joins me to explore how these myths are making A.I. into a reality, with no consideration as to whether or not we want that reality. He explains the true cost of this A.I. futurism on the environment, social cohesion, and even our imagination.
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Books referenced: Rethinking Racial Capitalism
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Reparations provide legal rights.
So argues lawyer and humanitarian, Esther Afolaranmi. Esther is the founder of the Golden Love and Hands of Hope Foundation in Nigeria, working on women’s liberation, girls’ education and lobbying the UN to meet the climate pledges promised at COP meetings. Esther joins me to discuss the links between climate, family planning, social justice and explains the corruption in Nigeria preventing the country from moving past the legacies of extraction and colonialism.
Esther explains that climate reparations are not about money, but about granting equal legal rights to the world’s most vulnerable communities. She also says that as long as unethical leaders break the promises made at climate conferences, those communities will be forced to take more desperate action to secure their futures.
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What would you lose to take a stand?
Gianluca Grimalda, a climate change researcher, lost his job after he refused to fly back from fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Gianluca has been “slow travelling” for decades. He thinks his former employer tried to make an example out of him because of his climate activism. It’s one of those stories that reveals the madness of the world—he was sent to research how vulnerable communities are responding to climate change as the seas consume their villages, and then told he could no longer continue that research if he did not commit an act of harm.
He joins me to share the preliminary results of his fieldwork and tell this incredible story: his activism, the threats of dismissal, the ongoing fight with the institute, and the incredible journey from Bougainville to Germany by ferry, train and coach. This is a tale that reminds us that some things are less complicated than we are led to believe—and that we cannot rely on our institutions for moral clarity.
Watch the film made about Gianluca’s journey here.
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Our bodies know what words fail to describe.
Shifts in culture, ravages of violence, ruptures and reconciliation—the body politic lives in our own bodies, informing and inhibiting our experience in the world. Yet, we fail to recognise this connection, and the even wider one of our own bodies as part of the earth's system, which is experiencing great violence and chaos. We need to reconnect with our bodies.
Ruptures is just one of the themes Ranu Mukherjee explores as an artist. She joins me to discuss this, and the somatic experience, deep time, the lives of plants, and the violence that ripples out through society. We explore the limitations of connection in economies of scale, how this informs our power hierarchies, and the violence we then internalise, which leads us to a beautiful conversation on uncertainty.
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We belong to our symbols as much as they belong to us. Like the planetary environment, our relationship with language and symbols has impacted our culture, even our biology, argues Professor of Anthropology, Terrence Deacon. Our capacity for interpretation allows us to understand one another and work as a collective mind, explaining the incredible leaps our species has made—and also the trouble we’re in.
Terrence joins me to explain our relationship to symbols and how they evolve with the world. We then discuss what happens when our symbols get stuck, or disconnected, simplifying into ideological constructs which fix our identities.
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Whoever controls the energy supply controls the new world order.
Russia and China are deepening their relationship, Western allies in the Middle East are joining the fossil-fuelled BRICS alliance spanning the globe, and the Wagner group is loosening Europe’s grip of Africa. The tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting along new fault lines as rising powers focus on securing resources while the old Empire in the West pretends it can decouple economies and energy. The world is at war, but only one side is being honest about what for.
Acclaimed energy expert Art Berman says this is the culmination of millennia of human fallibility. This is a conversation that takes us from 3000 BCE and the discovery of what he calls the most disruptive technology humans ever had right up to today and the energy wars blooming around the world. We discuss our psychological disposition to immaturity, our cognitive shortcomings when examining complexity, the secrets of holy texts and even morality. Art explains how energy is reshaping geopolitical alliances, which leaders understand the reality of our situation, and why technology cannot solve our problems.
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What's the relationship between our energy consumption, our material footprint and our economies?
Tim Garrett and I come to refer to these as “the holy trinity”. Tim is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah, and over two years ago, he joined me to discuss the thermodynamics of collapse, where he explained his research into the behaviour of snowflakes and how you could extrapolate the behaviour of economies and civilization using the laws of thermodynamics. He's back on the show to explain how we use our energy, the necessity of a surplus of energy and how all of this relates to a society's growth and health.
In this conversation we discuss questions like: Will renewables facilitate an increased consumption of fossil fuels? Can we reduce inequality by reducing energy consumption? How can we organise a wave-like civilisation, which grows and decays within safe boundaries? Can we decline in order to recover before crashing completely?
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What does artificial intelligence have in common with eugenics?
The first person to float the idea of a "general intelligence" was a eugenicist who was determined to rank intelligence according to race. This is just one of the legacies of A.I., a technology which Silicon Valley vehemently promises will transform the world, but which for now only consumes enormous quantities of energy. Despite the warnings from technologists around the world, for-profit companies are racing to develop A.G.I. no matter the costs.
Artist John Wild has traced the deep history of A.I., finding its roots in disturbing schools of thought which seek to raise the dead. He's also found where these histories are alive and kicking in C-Suite boardrooms. He joins me to reveal the disturbing imaginaries associated with A.I., and how we can begin to reimagine it as an entangled, decentralised, collaborative tool to create new ways of being.
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Who takes the initiative when governments fail to ask?
Amazingly, in Denmark, an industry is lobbying its government for much tighter regulations to absolutely reduce emissions in order to meet the Paris Agreement. Stakeholders across the entire Danish building industry have agreed to an ambitious reduction roadmap tafter a team of architects undertook an independent review of government policies. They found that global building emissions must be reduced by 96% to limit global warming, and are currently lobbying for an emissions cap of carbon dioxide kilograms per meter squared.
I'm joined by Dani Hill-Hansen, sustainable design engineer, architect at EFFEKT, and co-author of the Reduction Roadmap. She explains the findings of their research, the ambitious targets of the roadmap, how they got 540 stakeholders across the industry to sign on, and the methodology of "brand activism" they've developed alongside this project to kickstart other industries across the globe to initiate necessary climate action.
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What’s the future of food?
Last year, two of my former podcast guests had a long and very public disagreement about the politics of food, locking horns over the utility of farming in a densely-populated world. Activist and writer George Monbiot has written extensively about lab-grown food and the need to revolutionise our food systems with technology so that we can better feed everyone. Farmer and academic Chris Smaje has argued that farming is a critical component of community autonomy, and wrote a book in response to George’s own, Regenesis, criticising the vision as “eco-modernist”. George hit back that Chris’ proposal is a “cruel fantasy”.
I watched this unfold online, worried to see two experts disagree so deeply on something fundamental to how we organise society, and invited Chris back to talk about this second book, Saying No To A Farm-Free Future. Chris explains how our food production systems are emblematic of our crisis of relationship to the earth. He argues that de-materialising our food supply plays into the colonial history of uprooting people from the land and denigrating agriculture. This leads us to discuss land, language, and culture, decentralising power, and the political binaries that could be dissolved by grounding our thinking in the land.
Correction: The previous version of this interview stated that the debate between George Monbiot and Chris Smaje was around lab grown meat instead of lab grown food.
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We’re breaking all kinds of records at the moment: cities are boiling at 62C, ocean temperatures are literally off the charts, and governments have increased the global defence budget to an alarming $2440 billion.
War costs life, and not just human life. The environmental impacts of war are colossal, with one study already showing that the first few months of Israel’s assault on Gaza emitted more carbon dioxide than 20 climate-vulnerable nations do in one year. Our ecosystems are at their breaking point, with six of nine planetary boundaries crossed. We need global collaboration to commit the huge systems overhaul necessary to survive the planetary crises and mitigate the catastrophic decisions of the last centuries.
Olivia Lazard, research fellow at Carnegie Europe, joins me to discuss just how complex that task is, detailing the five steps of the Anthropocene and how violence increases at each step. We discuss these legacy systems of extraction and violence and how they are embedded into decisions being made around A.I., creating security risks in a resource-scarce world. We also cover the dematerialisation of our economies, the myths that blind us to energy and materials, before discussing the balance of power tipping our planet and human systems further into crisis.
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