Dear Reader,
I've realized something.
As much as I love writing profiles and telling other people's stories, it doesn't allow me to express my opinion and perspective as much as I would like.
I'm going to continue telling these stories but striking some sort of balance between personal essays, perspective pieces, and profiles - likely a profile one week and my personal opinion the next.
This week, because I didn't put the time in to get a profile ready, we're diving into a perspective essay of something that's been on my mind this past week.
What a pitiful profession it seems, to be a writer at the end of the world, to be any artist in our age. It seems that this work we’ve dedicated our lives to is under attack at every turn. We’re told by climate activists, “There’s no art on a dead planet.” We’re told by the tech obsessed, “Art is dead.”
Is there any point to this course we artists have committed ourselves to?
Yes, as I’ve described elsewhere, art has the capacity to be its own form of activism. Yes, art offers us the ability to perceive our planet and our peers in new ways. Yet, with the immortal works of long-dead legends weighing down my shelves and my soul with their legacies, I can’t help but feel that the foolish goal of mine and many others – the achievement of the illusion of immortality through lasting literature – is an ill-fated ideal in this moment of ours.
The literary pioneers of prior periods could benefit from the belief that their writing might still mean something after their deaths. They could believe that their books might persist if only they attained excellence and thereby unlock the sole form of immortality available to man: Remembrance. But for those of us who write in the here and now, trapped inside a car hurtling toward a cliff, what is there for us to hold on to during these lamplit mornings and nights hunched over our desks?
For those of us with sufficient exposure to the subjects shaping our collective destiny – climate science and artificial intelligence – it seems as though there are but two paths with that humanity will follow into the next era. Both lead to different versions of the same fate: decline, cultural degradation, and perhaps, even extinction.
Of course - though we often forget the fact – extinction is the inevitable end all species face. At some point, we all join the unending procession into Oblivion. However, when I speak of extinction here, I mean something much more proximate to the present, though by no means immediate. In either case, it seems that a literary life motivated by the pull of posterity may be fallacious and another motive must be found.
The first path before us seems to be the most grim: Death by ecological disaster. This is the direction in which we march given our incessant dependance on fossil fuels and the refusal of world leaders to do what needs to be done: inject the political and economic impetus necessary to enable the rapid transition off fossil fuels and cut emissions at least 50% by 2030. I’ll ignore any later targets because if we can’t make the 2030 goal – which we are well short of – the later goals are almost entirely irrelevant.
That said, if we miss that target, it won’t spark a sudden collapse, but it will trigger the continued decline of any one country’s ability to provide for its people and maintain even the semblance of stability. As this happens, refugees will flee from city to city and from nation to nation, introducing new stresses into already strained systems and arousing xenophobia and natalism to new heights. Preceding, accompanying, and succeeding these crises will be mass deaths from heat waves, drought, food scarcity, flooding, fires, and the other impacts of unnatural disasters and weather gone wicked that will worsen every year as oceans acidify and the atmosphere overheats.
Left unchecked, we will trip over tipping points, which will likely through climate models into question as we slip into a state of rapid unchecked change. This is what James Lovelock predicted based on his Gaian understanding of planetary habits. Should this occur, it’s nigh impossible to know what exactly will happen. Though, with nearly eight-billion humans on the planet at present, it’s hard to imagine that no one will survive. But it’s harder still to imagine what their lives will resemble. Agriculture will be arduous; hunter-gatherer lifestyles strenuous. In either case, survival alone will prove such a feat that the continuation of culture as we see it now is doubtful. What culture remains will, I imagine, represent a return to oral traditions, and literature will lack all meaning and purpose.
What of the other path? The path where we prevent planetary catastrophe and reshape society to live within the well-defined limits of the biosphere? What then?
Down that path lies a multitude of branching futures far beyond this simple scribbler’s capacity to predict – though they hope to help shape it. That future depends on how much the planet warms, what pockets of relative paradise persist, and how our political systems shift. But amid that chaos, there’s something that seems to me incontrovertible: technology will continue to progress and advance, particularly the positive feedback loop that defines artificial intelligence and computer. The only thing that would stop the advance of AI would be that segment of society caving in on itself – not impossible, but certainly unlikely.
Barring that outcome, if AI developments progress, the almost inevitable long-term outcome is the replacement of people with AI in all fields of human achievement. Yes, there are many who state their jobs could never be replaced. They also seem to be the ones with the least familiarity with how rapidly AI is evolving. Every year there is a new announcement about AI breaking barriers and outperforming the most advanced professions in fields far and wide. And as companies like Boston Dynamics push the envelope of robotics, there may even come a day when androids replace us in areas of manual labor.
While there’s no sign that a Terminator-esque end awaits anthropic civilization, there is a clear trend toward the eventual succession of humans by hyperintelligent, artificial lifeforms. So much is so clear that James Lovelock dedicated the last book of his long life to the subject.
In such an event, humans will be outcompeted from our evolutionary niche. This may not spell the immediate end for humanity, but that seems like a foregone conclusion unless our android overlords find some use for us – not that I can imagine what that would be beyond experimentation or entertainment. Alas, even in such a future where we’ve yet to die out but AI have indeed replaced us as Earth’s supreme intelligence, I can’t help but wonder what will happen to our arts? AI will no doubt be capable of producing works far superior to a person in depth, quality, and ingenuity, far faster than we ever could without some sort of cybernetic enhancement – even if they have as yet proved incapable of creativity.
That question, brings me back around to the question posed above: Given where we are and where we’re going, is there any point to writing or any artistic endeavor?
Admittedly, this is almost as if to ask if there is any point to any pursuit at the present if our future seems to be summarizable as: Damned if we don’t save ourselves; Doomed it we do. It seems that we’ve concocted a lose-lose scenario for ourselves, and though extinction was always a possibility, there’s something all the more sullen and solemn for it to feel so near. Though, I hope I am wrong.
That said, as I write this and wallow in the wickedness of the seemingly inevitable collapse of culture, I can’t help but feel that there is still a place, some strange place, for art amid this mass dying and the steep decline we approach. First, there’s the fact that we’re not dead yet, and despite the depressing possibilities, we’re capable of creating our own future, and art can help us to envision empowering alternatives – what I’ve illustrated are only the two most likely paths.
Second, there’s the solace the arts off. How dreary the end of our lives would be if hospices were merely enlarged coffins: blank walls, dark, muted, silent, and isolated. Alas, no. We fill the rooms of the dying with art and light and color and music and love.
Perhaps that’s what it means to be a writer and an artist at the end: to abandon posterity and embrace the present, to comfort a dying people on a dying planet as both fight for life.
In the News
A Black community in Texas is working to transform a capped landfill into a solar farm
A Toronto-based company is improving battery-recycling processes to prepare for surging EV purchases
With 3 different historic paintings targeted by climate activists, the movement debates tactics
Quote of the Week
Despite my musings above, I believe art has an incredibly important role in our moment and in the climate movement.
"The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible."
- Toni Cade Bambara
A Closing Contemplation
This week, I've been reflecting on my future and the future of humanity.
I've realized that regardless of how things go, I want to create what I can, while I can.
When you think about the future, what insights do you derive for how you wish to live in the present?
Peace, Love, and Power,
Syris Valentine