Asking "What is it For?" and The Last Shot
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When it Comes to New Technology, We Need to Ask, “What is it For?”
When people have asked me what I think of nuclear energy as a replacement for fossil fuels, I always say that it really depends on what that energy is used for. Is it used for a highly consumptive lifestyle based on the exploitation of people, creatures, and land? Is nuclear energy going to be used to power heavy industry, creating a more atomized, dislocated, technological society? Will it enable us to continue mining rivers, resources, monoculturing our food system, and producing toxic chemicals?
Nuclear energy has its own environmental downsides, but I try to orient my line of questioning deeper than the “what” that it is. Will nuclear energy enable us to have a limitless footprint on the earth? If we start using it widely, will we ever have a reason to dial back the modus operandi of our society — to exist on this earth within reasonable limits? Or will it just be another Jevons paradox — more energy added means more energy spent?
I think it’s important to ask these sorts of questions whenever technology is in question, because it helps us to see that the creation of a thing does not equal the total life of a thing. In the case of electric vehicles, for instance, it is argued that once it has been created, thereafter come the benefits (assuming that the electrical grid is magically set up in a “green” way, of course, which it isn’t). There is little doubt anymore that the process to create an electric vehicle from its rare-earth constituent parts is dirty, exploitative, and leaves behind a wake of human and ecological atrocities, but all of this is excused away because of the supposed carbon-savings that will be accrued during its life-span. So here the emphasis is to invisibilize the process of creation, and visibilize the projected long-term benefits, while also minimizing the long-term harms that might not have been calculated yet. It’s all very intentional.
In the case of nuclear energy, activists against it choose to visibilize the ecological dangers of its creation and the risks associated with potential disaster, but rarely do I hear them ask, what will this be used for? Pro-nuclear environmental activists like to pejoratively call anyone who questions nuclear energy “environmentalists against progress” because they tend to erroneously assume that the way we use energy in modernity is basically fine, it’s just that the fuel source is dirty. They assume that we only use energy for noble things like hospitals and making sure people are fed. This is simply not the case, unfortunately. Not only is over one third of food wasted globally, nearly 40% of our energy is used in industry, and the reality is that most industry is purely for over-consumption. The energy is being used to grow our economies (which does not equal a growth in income for regular people), expand technology, and make metric fuck-tons of money for only a handful of people. Which gets me to my next point.
I found it rather interesting that AI technology is seemingly being scrutinized in a similar way to how I scrutinize nuclear energy. In this article from Scientific American, the author explores the problems within the baseline usage of AI, which is hard to quantify its resource use as different models use a different amount of water, energy, etc, but also she explores how it is used, or, what is it for?
You see, this is why technology is not just neutral. AI can be used for medicine and hospitals and modeling hurricanes and possibly for climate change mitigation (people love to fixate on this point), yes — all of these noble uses. It can also be used to increase and expand the fossil fuel industry. It can also be used to technologize our food system in ways that will ravage small producers. It can also be used to expand global militarism and create totalitarian police states. It can also be used to mine you for all of your creativity and insight, as well as shove more precise marketing down your throat to continue churning the consumption machine. It can be used to enslave us all to a virtual un-reality that is selectively censorious and propagandistic — the better to control you with.
Of course, the world is complicated, and there are tradeoffs with every technology or innovation that comes into being. Nevertheless, I appreciate that there is at least the question of what is it for in this article because there should, at minimum, be a discussion of what those tradeoffs are. We need to visibilize the things that are easily rendered invisible (the subject of my next essay).
It ultimately seems like a basic question, but it has profound implications if applied to all of the technology we use in our lives because it can truly engender, at the very least, a line of questioning that extends far into the future. “What” a technology is in the present is absolutely important, but often it is different in conception than its future implications. Social media was supposed to connect us, now it’s primarily used to distract us, make us buy things, and mine our data, with a dash of connection. Could we have known what would become of this seemingly innocuous technology? Possibly not. But there are things that we can probe with our questioning, and we should.
In spite of our ability for it, humans in institutions, groups, and governments are notoriously bad at foresight, and we struggle applying holistic thinking to technology. In this period of techno-fixes and accelerated solutioneering, we need to exercise these muscle vigorously.
The Last Shot
Today we filmed the last shot for our film, What is the Human Animal? We really pushed this one off for a while because of some overly-complicated technical details, but today we’re getting this shot finished.
This film-piece of ours was far more conceptual than we first realized, resulting in a very exhausting process of creating everything from scratch: all of the visual assets, over 100 new shots, and so much painstaking editing. But we have finally done it.
The creative process is an interesting experience of pushing hard for your creative vision while making compromises as life teaches you there are energetic limits when it comes to creativity, and at a certain point, enough is enough. All of it ultimately culminates in lessons around respecting yourself and your limits and knowing what is possible within the given circumstances.
After spending so much time on something, you worry what faults and compromises that you see in your work will actually be noticed by others. Ultimately, that is the painful process of creatives: to let go and put yourself out there in all of the uncomfortable vulnerability.
Stay tuned for What is the Human Animal? If we work like maniacs for the rest of the day, we’ll have it out for our paid subscribers tomorrow!
Thank you all for being here. Much more to come!
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