The Enmeshment is Near
We tend to think of nature, human beings, and technology as three distinct categories. Nature encompasses landscapes, animals, weather, sunlight, and the physical, chemical, and biological forces that govern them. Human beings are primate bodies and their various drives, thoughts, expressions, dreams, and stories. Technology consists of machines, networks, satellites, factories, vehicles, gadgets, and the engineering principles they embody.
We believe nature to be under threat by Anthropogenic climate change, a phenomenon rooted in human motivation as expressed through industrial technology. This crisis has persistently migrated from the realm of the abstract to the concrete, as we suffer through another summer of shattered heat records, wildfires, and droughts. The crisis finds civilization circa 2022 AD a riotous mash-up of dazzling invention and mind-numbing stupidity. The Internet, our electronic global brain, provides nearly every person on the planet the means to tap into an unfathomably vast repository of maps, music, films, libraries upon libraries of written material, images, amusements, and outright lies, not to mention new methods to communicate the whole lot of it. The Internet both informs what we do while revealing who we are, and the humanity it reveals is frequently selfish, hateful, paranoid, cruel, deceitful, and straight-up bonkers. The composite human character that’s exposed on the web is far from static, as we’re biochemically and sociologically altered as a consequence of using these tools in the first place. This ecosystem of algorithms rewires our brains and adjusts our behavior, using us to bring itself into being as the earth burns.
This invention of inventions, through which data about any square inch of the globe and any star in the sky can be instantly transmitted, is pointillistically creating a portrait of a species that is making the planet on which it utterly depends hostile to its very survival. We stubbornly insist on framing earth’s ecological crisis as something that we are doing “to” the planet and continue to market certain products as “eco-friendly,” as though the ecology on which we rely exists at a distant remove from human affairs and responds to hubristic overtures of friendship. We can’t seem to shake the term “carbon footprint” as a benchmark to measure how human willpower is transforming the planet, despite growing understanding that this term was engineered by British Petroleum and marketing agency Ogilvy Meyer to divert scrutiny of the fossil fuels industry into the tar pits of individual consumer accountability. It’s easy to be cynical of governments that do too little too late, industries that slow-walk their way toward zero emissions, and the entertainment machine of Western culture that offers an abundance of distracting trivialities to sweep all of one’s worries away. Despair feels rational.
And yet despite the myriad horrors of heat, water, and toxins, this moment of global peril meets the arc of accelerating technological evolution with seemingly uncanny timing. It’s understandable that many of us scoff at the notion that a technological miracle will suddenly emerge to pull us from the brink of our DIY dystopia. But that attitude regards technology as a series of discrete inventions and innovations that are disconnected from one another rather than as an aggregate, interdependent force. It’s not one miraculous machine that will ensure that the earth remains habitable for human beings, but rather an entire web of entwined technologies that we’ll orient toward our most pressing goal–not of saving our planet, which bounced back just fine after five mass extinctions, no thanks to our friendliness, but saving our species, and many others besides, so that we can find other life in the universe.
Enmeshed Tools
Merely five decades ago, it was preposterous to suggest that we would have personal computers in our homes. Two decades after that, it was ridiculous to suppose that one day we would all carry computers in our pockets. The equivalent projection today is to imagine computers embedded in the natural world–riding ocean waves, astride the backs of honeybees, entangled with underground mycelium networks, monitoring individual cells in our bodies. In fact, that is precisely what’s happening, with the increasing enmeshment of what we call the natural world with humans and machines, primarily through three interrelated technologies: cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML). These technologies, all of which are becoming more enmeshed with physical reality, are simultaneously becoming more enmeshed with one another.
Cloud computing
Despite the borderline metaphysical ring of the term, the “cloud” refers to facilities located around the globe where data is stored, processed, and transferred; the network of cables, devices, and wireless technologies that connect these centers; and the software used to manage the data contained therein. Previous to the cloud, companies involved in information technology managed physical facilities in the form of server rooms or their own costly, climate-controlled buildings. This arrangement is referred to as “on-premises” or “on-prem” computing. For the past decade or so, organizations in every industry have been moving their on-prem data centers to the cloud. This allows them to grow quickly when necessary, pay for only the data storage they use instead of paying for servers on standby, and take advantage of cloud-native software that involves such advances as AI/ML.
Three major public cloud platforms currently lead the market: Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. There are also protocols and systems designed to operate among these and other clouds (multicloud) and between the cloud and on-prem servers (hybrid). One major leap for cloud computing is likely to come in the form of the quantum cloud, in which servers that use the ones and zeros of bits make way for machines that process qubits that can exist in a superposition of both one and zero, promising massive leaps in storage and processing power. We seem about as capable of imagining what these quantum supercomputers in the cloud will be able to do as users of mainframes in the 20th century were able to imagine the capabilities of the smart phones of the early 21st.
Step one: our global brain is growing in the cloud.
The Internet of Things
IoT, refers to any device that can measure or monitor properties of the physical world. A temperature gauge that uploads its readings to the Internet is part of the IoT. So are the monitors that the Surfrider Foundation embeds in surfboard fins to measure ocean temperature and salinity. In Bristol, England, researchers are using devices to monitor the electrical impulses that travel through fungal mycelium networks. Wildlife tracking devices monitor migration patterns of elephants and lions via satellite. When devices like these are connected to the Internet, they can use telemetry to deliver data to the cloud. Concurrent with the move from on-prem data centers to the cloud is the growth of Edge Computing, in which data processing occurs closer to where it is gathered. In other words, the monitors that we embed in the physical world are becoming more powerful computers themselves, capable of increasingly complex functions that we would previously depend on servers to tackle.
Step two: our growing global brain is gathering more data about the world.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
The third technology that signals an increased enmeshment between the Internet and the physical world is the software used to manage and manipulate data in the cloud, chiefly programs that fall under the rubric of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning. AI/ML is at its essence about recognizing patterns and predicting or triggering outcomes based on those patterns. You interact with Natural Language Processing, a subset of ML, when you respond vocally to automated customer support line calls.
Recently, a Google Engineer sparked controversy by suggesting that an AI had achieved sentience and deserved certain rights of personhood. Notwithstanding that thousands of years of philosophical inquiry have yet to come to an agreement on what “sentience” actually means, such claims are both deeply suspect and indicative of a period when technology is accelerating to the point of appearing almost mystical, exposing the limits of human intelligence more than the capacity of the artificial kind.
Today we pose questions and prompts to AIs; in the future our interactions with them will come to resemble prayers. Trained on mountains of data collected from the “real world” through IoT devices, and operating within the vast reaches of the quantum cloud, AIs will be at the center of a cultural debate that moves away from questions about whether machines are sentient to questions about how sentient we are.
Step three: our global brain is figuring out what to do with the data it is collecting in the cloud.
If all of this sounds foreboding, consider that maybe it isn’t machine intelligence we fear, but human stupidity. We’ve been projecting our fears that our creations will take on the worst aspects of ourselves at least since Frankenstein, the Golem of Jewish folklore, and any myth about the unintended consequences that lie at the intersection of innovation and hubris. We can expect the responses to the coming waves of uncanny, unsettling, and eerie demonstrations of machine intelligence to involve calls for regulation, bans, and other futile attempts to limit this technology’s proliferation as we become increasingly powerless to control that which we’ll be increasingly incapable of understanding.
The onus is on human beings to evolve as living data sets upon which our AIs depend. We fear the malice of machines in proportion to how much we fear our own malice against each other. Five minutes from the comfortable Seattle apartment where I’m writing this essay, I can visit fellow human beings who live outside in tents and are caught in a vortex of substance abuse, poverty, and sickness. I am just as complicit in this unconscionable social algorithm of woes as anyone. Because we’ve made a collective decision to tolerate that some people live in these conditions, we fear that machine intelligence will prove to be just as heartless. AI chatbots that spew racist nonsense are mimicking human behavior; when regarding machine learning, consider the teacher. Far from being a new kind of mind or alien intelligence, AI/ML is a brutally honest mirror into which we’ve begun to gaze and witness our social patterns, automated. This makes us uneasy. The best way to ensure that our machines will treat us kindly is to treat each other well.
The accelerating and enmeshed technological advances of the cloud, IoT, and AI/ML are wholly products of individual human minds, and arrive just in time for the multiple, entangled crises of Anthropogenic climate change. Up to now, most discussions about confronting these crises have focused on changing human behavior, either through public policy, consumer marketing, or some ineffectual combination of the two. A bias toward austerity in the face of crisis asks us to voluntarily abandon certain elements of our lifestyle for the good of the planet. It asks us to choose to relinquish tangible things (Styrofoam cups, gas guzzling cars, certain kinds of light bulbs, disposable grocery bags) to make a positive impact on an abstract phenomenon, i.e. the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. The fossil fuels industry, marshaling an army of public relations professionals, politicians, and lobbyists, maintains power over this crisis by making sure the idea of turning billionaires into mere millionaires by shutting itself down remains unfathomable. We avoid solutions that will require some people to lose their fortunes and/or go to prison in favor of gestural efforts that emphasize “raising awareness.”
What if, instead of browbeating ourselves into changing individual behavior, we were to harness that very behavior and engineer it toward a positive, rather than negative outcome? What if we had the means to tap into all that is trivial, easily distracted, ravenous for entertainment, and frivolous about human nature, then use these impulses to fuel a system that rehabilitates endangered habitats, removes plastic from oceans, develops renewable energy sources, and makes leaps and bounds toward planet-scale carbon sequestration technologies?
Environmental activists who express skepticism at the emergence of a magic bullet technological solution to reverse the climatological emergency of our own making aren’t wrong. But this position is akin to expressing skepticism that a hammer can build a house. A hammer is instrumental to building a house, but you also need saws, nails, and myriad other specialized tools working together, wielded by many hands. Just as a hammer is one part of a system of tools that can be orchestrated to build a house, so too are cloud platforms, remote sensing devices, AI/ML algorithms, and numerous other software and hardware elements that we can orchestrate to preserve our home.
Human motivation is the lynchpin of the emerging Enmeshment that uses our tools toward ensuring the persistence of life on earth. We can ask the global brain to take up this problem just as we envision a house while holding a hammer in our hand.
Building Behavioral Loops
In the physical world, you can plant a seed in a patch of soil, water it, and watch it grow into a tree over time. In the digital realm, you can click a button to place an order, send a message, or perform an action as an avatar in a game. Causes and effects. The Enmeshment provides the means for causes in a digital realm to be mapped to effects in the physical world and causes in physical reality to trigger effects in digital worlds. The actions we perform in virtual worlds on our devices and platforms can be designed to literally change the physical environments that our bodies occupy. And our digital worlds will come to be shaped in more granular ways according to the measurements of real-world biomes. This is already happening. The United Nations Environmental Programme sponsors the Playing 4 the Planet Alliance, an industry group in which some of the most prominent game companies in the world, representing the most lucrative entertainment medium of all time, are exploring enmeshed solutions to our climate crisis through games. Video game studios have begun developing games that initiate planting actual trees in the physical world for every virtual tree that’s planted in a digital world. Digital twins–three dimensional representations of real world places that respond in real time to data generated by those sources–open new opportunities to establish causal connections between the natural world and virtual manifestations. Unity Technologies, for example, is just one of many companies in the gaming sector with teams of people focused on finding novel ways to leverage their game engine for projects involving environmental monitoring, conservation, and restoration.
We don’t even have to limit ourselves to earth data when it comes to building enmeshed feedback loops between the physical and digital worlds. The Vera Rubin Observatory, set to gaze upon the heavens from its perch on a Chilean mountain later this year, will be using Google Cloud, AI/ML, and a data platform called Google BigQuery to process images of asteroids and other celestial phenomena. It’s entirely possible to create applications that turn this data into video games. Imagine starting your day by checking out the Wordle then switching over to Asteroid Chicken, in which you’re randomly assigned an asteroid the observatory detected in the past 24 hours. You earn points depending on your asteroid’s proximity to earth, with a leaderboard indicating which player’s asteroid came closest and a cumulative score over time. Now imagine that this data is shared with agencies that are responsible for deploying asteroid-deflecting technologies. On one level, you’re just playing a game on your phone. On another, you’re contributing to the planet’s new capacity to protect itself from incoming threats.
The Enmeshment is Here
In order to make the most of the Enmeshment, we must shed three primary delusions.
First is that human beings and technology exist apart from nature. Nature encompasses everything, including artificiality itself. Saving “the planet” means embracing that we are the planet and committing to saving ourselves.
Second is the delusion that confronting our crisis is primarily a matter of changing human behavior. Our behavior is the result of millions of years of furry little creatures cunningly staying one step ahead of catastrophe. The earth understands how to survive, and has come back and reimagined its biodiverse beauty through at least five mass extinctions. Our global brain is growing, gathering more data, and figuring out how to use it to ensure the persistence of life. We are all part of that thought process.
The third delusion is that we’re helpless to make a difference. Every gene in our DNA found its way to this moment through a bewildering array of environmental challenges and we inherit the equity of billions of years of survival on earth. We’re human beings. We change the world. That’s what we do. And what’s most thrilling to contemplate is what waits for us on the other side of our crisis, the golden era when we’ve lowered the temperature, withdrawn the plastic from the seas, buried the carbon underground, and seeded the gardens of every continent. With our eyes trained heavenward on a clear night sky, who can imagine what wonders we’re yet to discover?
