Day 22: you may live in interesting times

My nights have started getting late again. In my defence, the daughter wakes up at 11 pm sharp every night; her body clock seems infallible. (It used to be 10, but then we were hit by the curse of daylight savings. She, being one, sensibly ignored it.) So it hardly seems worth going to bed before then when we’re only going to get woken up anyway.

I spent the day with the family, taking our son to the miniature trains (autism and trains; they’re like peas and carrots), visiting the plant nursery, getting some new berry bushes, weeding, planting, planning. It’s been wonderful. What’s been less good is that I’ve finished the first draft of the AI article and I can honestly say I hate it. Not for the normal reasons I might dislike my writing, I think the prose is more or less OK, but because it is such a catastrophically depressing topic. An internet full of slop is among the least upsetting things about AI; the path that the tech-overlord lunatics has us on ends in giga-ecocide and I wish I was exaggerating. (And not because of some fabled AI superintelligence either. Superintelligence is bunk.)

This is such a difficult tension to work with; on one hand I am trying to live a good life, beset by First World luxury and my beautiful family, trying to start a business and spread a little joy with my silly paintings. On the other hand, climate change — the field I’d most like to work in, because it’s important, but my life’s trajectory has so far sent me otherwise — is bearing down on us; a slow inexorable bomb with the power of hundreds of thousands of nuclear weapons. It is a bomb we have the power to stop, or at least prevent from detonating catastrophically, and civilisation’s leadership has so far decided on “no.” It would impact share prices, you see.

Again, I wish I was kidding.

So I’m doing the only thing I can, writing what I know, which isn’t much. But it’s something. And at some stage soon I hope to do a new video essay combining the article I’ve just written with the sharp juxtaposition of a beautiful painting time-lapse, because that’s the world as it is and perhaps always has been. The beauty and the horror, the two sides of the same coin.