G:TBook Review

Courtesy of our OBX correspondent, a thoughtful review of what appears to be provocative and complex argument about the very future of the human race. My take? We're all fucked, but some of us will pass on in time to not really have to worry about it. That's not sardonic flippancy. It's what I actually believe. Maybe our ancestors will get lucky.

Author and activist Bill McKibben has banged the drum about climate change and inequality for 30 years. He’s stood on glaciers and visited remote villages where electricity is a rumor. He’s met with Silicon Valley executives and with subsistence level farmers.

McKibben’s latest book, Falter, treads familiar ground, but he asks a larger question: Has the human game begun to play itself out? He cites the twin perils of unchecked climate change and artificial intelligence as potentially altering human existence irrevocably moving forward.

He cites science, history, personal reporting and anecdotes and plenty of outside sources. There’s ample gloom and doom, but he also offers suggestions for how we might still walk back from the brink. For its weighty subject matter, it’s an interesting, breezy, almost conversational 256-page read.

As he wrote at the beginning of the book: “A writer doesn’t owe a reader hope – the only obligation is honesty – but I want those who pick up this volume to know that its author lives in a state of engagement, not despair. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have bothered writing what follows.”

Income inequality, McKibben writes, means that increasingly few people are making more and larger decisions about everyone else. Rising seas and expanding areas of drought mean that “the size of the board on which we’re playing will get smaller.”

He writes about a Randian, libertarian streak that has taken over the upper levels of the conservative movement for the past 40 years, from Reagan, Thatcher, the Bush presidencies, the Koch brothers, and now Trump. A triumph of the individual and the idea that a person’s value is measured by what they produce and what they earn, and that society and the collective are for suckers and mooches.

The oil companies, McKibben writes, were doing their own research about the possible damage from increased carbon dioxide levels as far back as the 1970s and essentially buried the findings. “Global warming is the ultimate problem for oil companies,” he writes, “because oil causes it, and it’s the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention you can’t solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change.”

One of McKibben’s favorite words in the book is “leverage” – the outsized influence a small group of individuals or one industry wields. “The politics of one country for one 50-year period will have rewritten the geological history and crimped the human game,” he writes. “That’s what leverage looks like.”

The end of the human race, or our best hope for the future?
Discuss.

He also worries about artificial intelligence that smarts its way beyond our ability to control it. He writes that we may not be far away from the possibility of producing designer babies, who are smarter and stronger and better. Since that won’t be cheap, he says such a development could exacerbate inequality. And given the rapid rate of technological improvement, wouldn’t each batch of designer humans essentially become second-rate and less after a short time? If outcomes are programmed into people, doesn’t that diminish the human experience?

McKibben also writes that an inordinate number of powerful people in Silicon Valley are freaked out by death (who knew?), or rather obsessed with the idea of prolonging their own lives. There’s no shortage of start-ups involving new drugs or cryogenics or tech implants. An exceptionally smart gent named Ray Kurzweil, who’s the director of engineering at Google and who McKibben is fond of, hopes to live long enough so that nanobots can fix his aging cells and extend his life, or perhaps connect his brain to the cloud so that it may be implanted elsewhere and effectively live forever.

“The technologists at some level value individual humans too much,” he writes, “they value humanness far too little.”

But there’s hope, McKibben writes at the end of the book. It takes the form of solar panels and the non-violent protest movement. Solar panels can produce power cheaply and efficiently, particularly in places where there is none, such as African villages. Solar power can supplement and eventually replace fossil fuels, creating jobs and decreasing costs along the way. McKibben also takes heart from the non-violent movement, which helped turn the tide for women’s suffrage in this country, Indian independence under Gandhi, civil rights and gay marriage.

It won’t be easy, McKibben writes. Much damage has been done and we’re already a long way down the road. Many forces and much money are aligned against changing the status quo. But it’s possible and vital.

“The libertarian ideal of individual autonomy, which to one extent or another every modern human understands and cherishes,” he writes, “runs aground when the stakes get as high as ecological hell or human meaninglessness.”

Regardless of your politics, it’s a worthy read.