Digital Is The ONLY Path To Environmental Sustainability
We are never going to get to environmental sustainability without a comprehensive networking system that coordinates our energy generation and consumption and provides a coordinated digital consciousness of industry, air pollution and cradle to grave measurement of environmental footprint of everything from the rain forest to a steel mill.
This will not be an easy to coordinate task. A 5G signal without new fiber infrastructure, end points and application software is like changing a technical communication protocol without changing network bandwidth or the computing resources. It might help a little but it’s the holistic system change that creates true alchemy. Such a digital system will require inter-government coordination and private-public investment at a scale never yet seen.
The commitment required to deploy a comprehensive overarching networked implementation of telemetry and machine intelligence to interpret the associated massive amounts of data collected representing our living footprint will no doubt generate knee jerk (justified) fear based reactions. Worldwide. One might recoil from this in fear of “big brother” or Hollywood imagined runaway artificial intelligence. It’s true, it’s thin ice and we need to use caution and wisdom. But it’s this path or literal “thin ice” that will mean planetary level misery and disruption. The problem with rejecting such a digital path of environmental consciousness is that the alternative — i.e. not doing a digitally connected ecosystem — is infinitely worse.
In defense of the “do-ability” of this digital path consider this: It’s merely a technical implementation of something we already live with and have lived with at least since the mid 19th century. Once the world was mapped and explored colonialism emerged — essentially the consciousness of a few powerful nations extended worldwide. That network of power and viewpoints, what French philosopher Michel Foucault called “capillaries of power” (for all I know there may be previous references). Global networking, starting at least 300 years ago, has simply been extended and reinforced via technology, world wars and ongoing population migration. We already live in a connected world. People born after the year 2000 have known nothing but a digital world. Formalizing and adopting a global digital system that has the purpose of environmental measurement and optimization is our only path out.
You might not like reading this assessment. It doesn’t change the truth. Abatement of our environmental disaster, and for that matter our disaster of global inequity and injustice, has only one path of improvement. A globalized fully connected and machine intelligence enhanced monitoring and management system. If this one lifebuoy frightens you that’s reasonable, it should. It is, however, the one that will be built. We can either democratize and work to defuse its potential hazards or we can simply let things get so bad a less benevolent implementation will be the one we grab rather than simply drown in the depths.
Time is wasting, time to get started on a solution path built by a process as transparent, just and democratic as possible.
Or, alternatively, wait until like a person gasping and desperate with ever fiber for their last breath before sinking into the ocean depths we will grab the lifebuoy frantically with no regard to “terms and conditions”.
The choice is yours, ours. The decision time-frame? Now.
