South Wind

Since its inception in 2022, The Rest is Politics has rated at or near the top of UK political podcasts, and in this polarised era has shown the value of bringing together political opposites to explore contentious public issues.

Eton-educated Rory Stewart, a former Conservative cabinet minister, has as his co-host Alastair Campbell, who became famous as Labour’s chief hard man in Tony Blair’s government 25 years ago.

It’s an inspired pairing. Campbell’s knowledge of political cut-and-thrust complements Stewart’s informed grasp of global affairs and the world of artificial intelligence. Last week the pair grilled Scottish moral philosopher William MacAskill on the looming AI revolution.

In this space a couple of years ago I repeated another philosopher’s view that the worst AI could do was make our species dumber. I’ve since heard from MacAskill and others like New York Times bestselling authors Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, authors of a new book on advanced AI called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. I’m now persuaded that we should indeed be worried.

A disclosure: as an AI user I’m well outside the tent. I’m aware of improvements to internet searching, but my hands-on AI knowledge ends there. I would know less about the use of AI tools or agents than any experienced smartphone user.

But I do understand the motives behind the rise of AI – the pursuit of power, influence and money – and the potential for things to go badly awry. I’m guided on detail by those who, like MacAskill, have been closely involved in its development.

A year ago MacAskill urged people to reflect on living with AGI – advanced AI that’s functionally smarter than humans.“What does a good society look like when we have humans and … trillions of [virtual] AI beings?” he asked. … How do we coexist in an ethical and morally respectable way?”

Within five years, he told Campbell and Stewart, with AI able to automate research and development, “we’ll have this leap forward in AI capabilities. After that, we’ll have something like a century’s worth of technological progress happening in a decade or less.”

MacAskill is advocating passionately for greater public oversight, especially in the US, of this rapidly-unfolding expansion of AI systems to reach human-level capability in research including, importantly, research into AI itself.

Once that is achieved, he warns, AI development will be in a self-improvement cycle in which rapidly improving algorithms and chip manufacturing will see the equivalent of millions, then billions, then trillions of superhuman AI “scientists” working continuously all day every day, without any of the limitations applying to humans at work.

“These systems will collaborate across disciplines, build on each discovery instantly, and conduct experiments at unprecedented scale and speed – compressing a century of scientific progress into mere years,” leading to hasty choices and a higher risk of something going badly wrong.

The Industrial Revolution unfolded over a century in Britain. Over just years, says MacAskill, the AI revolution will be vastly more impactful and its reach will be global. He believes the next few years are humanity’s most critical moment in all history.

There are some caveats, notably energy supply. Current evolving stories in the US of proposed data centre projects – one of them in Louisiana the size of Manhattan – has seen both Democrat and Republican legislators speak out against them over their massive energy and water demands.

Some, including Sarah Wilson, the prophet of collapse I wrote about last week, believe the AI revolution’s thirst for data driving those city-scale electricity demands will ensure AI’s collapse before it really gets going.

But MacAskill told Campbell and Stewart that in the long term most computing will happen out in space “because that’s where all the energy is”, referring to the fact that accessible solar power in space is far greater than on Earth. SpaceX founder Elon Musk leads the charge for data centres in space.

In 2024 an all-male cohort of tech venture capitalists who became known as the “broligarchy” drew close to Donald Trump’s election campaign and incoming administration. The “techbros” include Musk, Peter Thiel (who backed JD Vance’s vice-presidential campaign), David Sachs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Marc Andreessen, along with the likes of Palantir CEO Alex Karp.

The potential power of these ambitious, competitive, focused, fantastically wealthy men goes to every corner of human life. Some are deeply immersed in US defence and policing. If MacAskill’s worst fears are realised one of them will end up controlling surveillance, repression, waging war – and everything else.

That’s an extreme scenario. The more likely outcome is Wilson’s argument that societal collapse will thwart the broligarchy’s best-laid plans. But I wouldn’t bet the house on it.

In a week when Planetary Living Treasure David Attenborough turned 100 and Australian and UK electors turned science deniers into rock stars, I got lost in a book about our new age of extinction and the collapse of global civilisation. Such is life in these turbulent times.

Members of our species, and our species alone, know that one day they will die. We celebrate that special knowledge on birthdays, our countdown to that inevitable end. My week started with a wonderful, cinematic 80th birthday party for Tony, who I knew at school, so the two of us are more or less in the same place on our life’s journey.

My sense of death has evolved slowly. When my grandfather died my mother told me and my twin sister, aged five, that he’d gone to sleep and wouldn’t wake up. We knew he was old and sick, but even so we felt wonder, even awe, in this moment. More shocking were the deaths of a classmate from cancer and of a high-school teacher and his wife in a car accident.

It still startles me a little to hear of a death of someone familiar, but while I can still be shaken by any violence or distress that might accompany death, the dying part no longer bothers me. At my age – and I’m sure this applies to many adults reading this – death has lost its shock factor.

Death on a planetary scale is the subject of a new book by Australian author Sarah Wilson, titled I Eat the Stars. “Sometimes as an antidote/to fear of death/I eat the stars” were lines of a poem by a brilliant young Canadian astronomer, Rebecca Elson (1960-1999), written after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Says Wilson, we were told over decades, rightly, that there was hope if we acted to stop emissions immediately, but we didn’t act immediately so hope is off the table. The collapse now underway is unstoppable. All we can do is allow it to happen and put our minds to the aftermath.

Becoming collapse-aware is not “doomist”, she writes. Collapse isn’t some fringe conspiracy theory but a phenomenon tracked in universities and institutes around the world. If you think things are this bad, “you’re not alone and you are not imagining things.”

Having contemplated at length, over many years, the things that Wilson is concerned about, and having previously said that that the war against warming is lost, I should have been prepared for this book, but I wasn’t.

Wilson’s insights into our awful predicament are both mind-blowing and empowering. Her book’s subtitle – How to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world – is a hint of this.

Our individual deaths are not the only ones we as humans need to contemplate, says Wilson. Humanity itself – “the grand experiment that is the human endeavour” is facing an existential crisis brought on by climate change and other excesses of our industrial economies. Thinking about this bereavement, writes Wilson, “I feel my heart splinter.”

Wilson points to “a third death in play in a collapsing world… the death of the ‘old normal’ – all those structures, assumptions and mindsets that make up our postindustrial civilisation… We are now at the structural limits to the growth that it relies on. And we… literally can’t afford to keep it going.”

Past hegemonies like the Roman and Mayan empires and the Qing dynasty, says Wilson, lasted 250 to 300 years. For over half a century we’ve been warned that the complex civilisation we’ve grown up with is now close to its end – about 270 years after its inception at the start of the industrial age. Except that this civilisation is global.

Wilson rejects talk of hope, a word often used by scientists and commentators wanting to reassure people. We need truth, not hope, she says. Or as Cameron, one of her online correspondents, put it, “I wouldn’t want my doctor to keep a terminal diagnosis from me. I’d rather know what is going on, how long I’ve got, so I can prioritise my life.”

Beyond truth, we need something else, revealed most clearly in times of crisis. The powers of love and kindness are most keenly felt when we’re confronted with our insignificance in the scheme of things. “We get stuck with the electrifying truth,” says Wilson: “I don’t matter, but in my stead all that is eternal does.”

The truths in this book are confronting, but they’re also liberating. Keenly aware of readers’ vulnerabilities, Wilson leaves us not cringing in fear but strengthened in the knowledge that we’re not alone.

Wilson writes about what’s really happening, while the world of One Nation’s Pauline Hanson and Reform UK’s Nigel Farage is a fantasyland. That’s humanity. Messy.

For generations, the material successes of our industrial age – medical cures, easy travel, global conversations and the like – suppressed undercurrents of doubt about how long we might keep this up. Faced with this, young Bill McKibben named his first book The End of Nature.

McKibben’s 1989 climate change polemic came just after physicist James Hansen warned the US Congress to “stop waffling” about signs of a warming Earth. It became an enduring classic of its kind, in the mould of Rachel Carson’s 1962 pesticides exposé, Silent Spring.

In that moment at least, politicians listened. In 1992, heads of state agreed at the Rio “Earth Summit” to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

But trouble lay ahead. The burning of coal, oil and gas created giant global corporations, which in 1997 in Kyoto conspired with political interests to spread the blame and cloud the issue. Ever since, that unholy alliance has bedevilled every effort to turn things around.

A 1989 reviewer called McKibben’s book “a matter of life and death”. If that was so then it seems even more so today, 37 years later, given science’s increasingly dire signals. But McKibben in his seventies is sounding a more sanguine note.

In his latest book, Here Comes the Sun (acknowledging Beatle George Harrison), McKibben says that having caused our climate woes technology can also solve them – if we allow it to.

All Earth’s energy, bar a minuscule 0.03 per cent from internal heat, comes from the sun. For a billion years or so it was sequestered as coal, oil and gas, which we plundered – because we could. Now we’ve finally worked out other means of harnessing solar energy, indirectly via wind and hydro and directly via photovoltaic cells.

And we’re doing this cheaply and at an unprecedented rate. As the International Energy Agency reported a fortnight ago, the world is entering an “age of electricity”, and last year turns out to be a banner year in the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Unlike past times of lower fossil fuel use resulting from economic recession, the global economy in 2025 grew at a normal rate, yet coal, the world’s main source of electricity for more than 100 years, was edged out by renewables for the first time. New installations of carbon-free energy exceeded overall demand, meaning that renewables are now displacing fossil fuel sources.

The growth rate of carbon emissions reached record levels last year, but the main driver was developed economies, mainly in North America. In India, China and smaller developing countries like Indonesia, emissions growth is slowing with rapid take-up of solar power and electric vehicles.

The fossil fuel lobby along with advocates for nuclear – let’s call them centralists – would like us to see solar and wind power as intermittent, temporary, peripheral to the main game which will always be those familiar energy hubs, big power stations. But that’s a fallacy.

Dave Borlace, the friendly bloke from the UK I mentioned last week, has drawn attention to a fine piece of work by another Briton, Michael Liebreich, explaining why fossil heavyweights have been able to skew the public argument to make the energy transition seem much slower than it really is.

Only about a third of the energy from coal burnt in a power station becomes electricity; the rest is waste heat. The “primary energy” referred to by centralists includes all that wasted thermal energy.

There’s no such waste in solar and wind. As Liebreich points out, with no thermal loss the power generated is all delivered as electrons. So while fossil fuels may continue to serve heavy industry, aviation and shipping, physics dictates that everywhere else, including land transport, direct electrification using increasingly-efficient battery storage will always win out.

In mid-2023, notes McKibben, the world installed for the first time a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels – the equivalent of a new nuclear or coal plant – every day. At the same time in 2024, the hottest year yet measured, “we were putting up a gigawatt of solar panels every 18 hours”.

Despite political headwinds and fierce resistance from fossil fuels, wind and solar installation is “scaling faster than any technology before them”. The achievement of those 18 hours had taken a week in 2016, and a whole year in 2004. The revolution continues, and it’s happening everywhere, on every continent.

In this context today’s dominant paradigms don’t seem to matter. Says McKibben, it’s possible that historians will note these few years for the Trump renaissance, or the birth of AI. “But if we’re lucky, they’ll be recalled as the moment we took a decisive turn toward the sun.”