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Category Archives: Humanity
Our voices and actions bring hope for the year ahead
David Suzuki writes: Like any year, 2015 had its share of good and bad, tragedy and beauty, hope and despair. It’s difficult not to get discouraged by events like the Syrian war and refugee crisis, violent outbreaks in Beirut, Paris, Burundi, the U.S. and so many other places, and the ongoing climate catastrophe.
But responses to these tragedies and disasters offer hope. It became clear during 2015 that when those who believe in protecting people and the planet, treating each other with fairness, respect and kindness and seeking solutions stand up, speak out and act for what is right and just, we will be heard.
As Syria descended deeper into chaos during 2015, people in many wealthy nations called for blocking refugees. But many more opened their hearts, homes and wallets and showed compassion. Governments responded by opening doors to people who have lost everything, including family and friends, to flee death and destruction.
Shootings and the inevitable absurd arguments against gun control continued south of the border, but many people, including the president, rallied for an end to the insanity. And while the U.S. presidential race remains mired in bigotry, ignorance and a dumbfounding rejection of climate science, many U.S. citizens, including political candidates, are speaking out for a positive approach more aligned with America’s professed values. And in 2015, voters here and elsewhere rejected fear-based election campaigns that promoted continued reliance on climate-altering coal, oil and gas.
The fossil fuel industry and its supporters continued to sow doubt and confusion about the overwhelming evidence for human-caused climate change and to rail against solutions, but many more people marched, signed petitions, sent letters, talked to friends and family, demanded action from political, religious and business leaders, and got on with innovating and implementing solutions.
The public appetite for a constructive approach to global warming led Canada to shift course in 2015, taking global warming seriously enough to make positive contributions at the Paris climate conference in December. The resulting agreement won’t lower emissions enough to prevent catastrophic warming, but it’s a significant leap from previous attempts, and it includes commitments to improve targets.
If we want to heal this world we have so badly damaged, we must do all we can. Although many necessary and profound changes must come from governments, industry and other institutions, we can all do our part. For the climate, we can conserve energy, eat less meat, drive less, improve energy efficiency in our homes and businesses and continue to stand up and speak out. [Continue reading…]
To what extent might Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk be right about the dangers of artificial intelligence?
Suzanne Sadedin, an evolutionary biologist, writes: I think they are right that AI is dangerous, and they are dangerously wrong about why. I see two fairly likely futures.
Future 1: AI destroys itself, humanity and most or all life on earth, probably a lot sooner than in 1000 years.
Future 2: Humanity radically restructures its institutions to empower individuals, probably via transhumanist modification that effectively merges us with AI. We go to the stars.
Right now, we are headed for Future 1, but we could change this. Much as I admire Elon Musk, his plan to democratise AI actually makes Future 1 more, not less, likely.
Here’s why:
There’s a sense in which humans are already building a specific kind of AI; indeed, we’ve been gradually building it for centuries. This kind of AI consists of systems that we construct and endow with legal, real-world power. These systems create their own internal structures of rules and traditions, while humans perform fuzzy brain-based tasks specified by the system. The system as a whole can act with an appearance of purpose, intelligence and values entirely distinct from anything exhibited by its human components.
All nations, corporations and organisations can be considered as this kind of AI. I realise at this point it may seem like I’m bending the definition of AI. To be clear, I’m not suggesting organisations are sentient, self-aware or conscious, but simply that they show emergent, purpose-driven behaviour equivalent to that of autonomous intelligent agents. For example, we talk very naturally about how “the US did X”, and that means something entirely different from “the people of the US did X” or “the president of the US did X”, or even “the US government did X”.
These systems can be entirely ruthless toward individuals (just check the answers to What are some horrifying examples of corporate evil/greed? and What are the best examples of actions that are moral, even uplifting, but illegal? if you don’t believe me). Such ruthlessness is often advantageous — even necessary, because these systems exist in a competitive environment. They compete for human effort, involvement and commitment. Money and power. That’s how they survive and grow. New organisations, and less successful ones, copy the features of dominant organisations in order to compete. This places them under Darwinian selection, as Milton Friedman noted long ago.
Until recently, however, organisations have always relied upon human consent and participation; human brains always ultimately made the decisions, whether it was a decision to manufacture 600 rubber duckies or drop a nuclear bomb. So their competitive success has been somewhat constrained by human values and morals; there are not enough Martin Shkrelis to go around.
With the advent of machine learning, this changes. We now have algorithms that can make complex decisions better and faster than any human, about practically any specific domain. They are being applied to big data problems far beyond human comprehension. Yet these algorithms are still stupid in some ways. They are designed to optimise specific parameters for specific datasets, but they’re oblivious to the complexity of the real-world, long-term ramifications of their choices. [Continue reading…]
Soil loss: An unfolding disaster that will have catastrophic effects on world food production
The Guardian reports: The world has lost a third of its arable land due to erosion or pollution in the past 40 years, with potentially disastrous consequences as global demand for food soars, scientists have warned.
New research has calculated that nearly 33% of the world’s adequate or high-quality food-producing land has been lost at a rate that far outstrips the pace of natural processes to replace diminished soil.
The University of Sheffield’s Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, which undertook the study by analysing various pieces of research published over the past decade, said the loss was “catastrophic” and the trend close to being irretrievable without major changes to agricultural practices.
The continual ploughing of fields, combined with heavy use of fertilizers, has degraded soils across the world, the research found, with erosion occurring at a pace of up to 100 times greater than the rate of soil formation. It takes around 500 years for just 2.5cm of topsoil to be created amid unimpeded ecological changes. [Continue reading…]
Local ecological disasters are too easily obscured by the lofty discourse of climate change
Brandon Keim writes: In the Great Basin desert of the western United States, not far from the Great Salt Lake, is a kind of time machine. Homestead Cave has been inhabited for the past 13,000 years by successive generations of owls, beneath whose roosts accumulated millennia-deep piles of undigested fur and bone. By examining these piles, researchers have been able to reconstruct the region’s ecological history. It contains a very timely lesson.
Those 13,000 years spanned some profound environmental upheavals. Indeed, the cave opened when Lake Bonneville, a vast prehistoric water body that covered much of the region, receded at the last ice age’s end, and the Great Basin shifted from rainfall-rich coolness to its present hot, dry state. Yet despite these changes, life was pretty stable. Different species flourished at different times, but the total amount of biological energy – a metric used by ecologists to describe all the metabolic activity in an ecosystem – remained steady.
About a century ago, though, all that changed. There’s now about 20 per cent less biological energy flowing through the Great Basin than at the 20th century’s beginning. To put it another way: life’s richness contracted by one-fifth in an eyeblink of geological time. The culprit? Not climate change, as one might expect, but human activity, in particular the spread of invasive non-native grasses that flourish in disturbed areas and have little nutritional value, sustaining less life than would the native plants they’ve displaced.
I find myself thinking often of the parable of Homestead Cave, as I’ve come to call it. It underscores how resilient nature can be, and also the enormity of human impacts, which in this case dwarfed the transition to an entirely new climate state. The latter point, I fear, is too often overlooked these days, obscured by a fixation on climate change as Earth’s great ecological problem.
Make no mistake: climate change is a huge, desperately important issue. And it feels strange, if not downright traitorous, to raise concerns about the attention it receives. The parable of Homestead Cave is no licence to shirk climate duties on the assumption that nature will adapt, or to imagine that a rapidly warming, weather-extremed Earth won’t be calamitous for non‑human life. It will be. But so is a great deal else that we do. Paying attention to climate change and to other human impacts shouldn’t be a zero-sum game, but it too often seems that way. [Continue reading…]
When languages die, we lose a part of who we are
By Anouschka Foltz, Bangor University
The 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP21) is in full gear and climate change is again on everyone’s mind. It conjures up images of melting glaciers, rising sea levels, droughts, flooding, threatened habitats, endangered species, and displaced people. We know it threatens biodiversity, but what about linguistic diversity?
Humans are the only species on the planet whose communication system exhibits enormous diversity. And linguistic diversity is crucial for understanding our capacity for language. An increase in climate-change related natural disasters may affect linguistic diversity. A good example is Vanuatu, an island state in the Pacific, with quite a dramatic recent rise in sea levels.
There are over 7,000 languages spoken in the world today. These languages exhibit enormous diversity, from the number of distinctive sounds (there are languages with as few as 11 different sounds and as many as 118) to the vast range of possible word orders, structures and concepts that languages use to convey meaning. Every absolute that linguists have posited has been challenged, and linguists are busy debating if there is anything at all that is common to all languages in the world or anything at all that does not exist in the languages of the world. Sign languages show us that languages do not even need to be spoken. This diversity is evidence of the enormous flexibility and plasticity of the human brain and its capacity for communication.
Studying diverse languages gives us invaluable insights into human cognition. But language diversity is at risk. Languages are dying every year. Often a language’s death is recorded when the last known speaker dies, and about 35% of languages in the world are currently losing speakers or are more seriously endangered. Most of these have never been recorded and so would be lost forever. Linguists estimate that about 50% of the languages spoken today will disappear in the next 100 years. Some even argue that up to 90% of today’s languages will have disappeared by 2115.
Millet: The missing piece in the puzzle of prehistoric humans’ transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers
New research shows a cereal familiar today as birdseed was carried across Eurasia by ancient shepherds and herders laying the foundation, in combination with the new crops they encountered, of ‘multi-crop’ agriculture and the rise of settled societies. Archaeologists say ‘forgotten’ millet has a role to play in modern crop diversity and today’s food security debate.
The domestication of the small-seeded cereal millet in North China around 10,000 years ago created the perfect crop to bridge the gap between nomadic hunter-gathering and organised agriculture in Neolithic Eurasia, and may offer solutions to modern food security, according to new research.
Now a forgotten crop in the West, this hardy grain – familiar in the west today as birdseed – was ideal for ancient shepherds and herders, who carried it right across Eurasia, where it was mixed with crops such as wheat and barley. This gave rise to ‘multi-cropping’, which in turn sowed the seeds of complex urban societies, say archaeologists.
A team from the UK, USA and China has traced the spread of the domesticated grain from North China and Inner Mongolia into Europe through a “hilly corridor” along the foothills of Eurasia. Millet favours uphill locations, doesn’t require much water, and has a short growing season: it can be harvested 45 days after planting, compared with 100 days for rice, allowing a very mobile form of cultivation.
Nomadic tribes were able to combine growing crops of millet with hunting and foraging as they travelled across the continent between 2500 and 1600 BC. Millet was eventually mixed with other crops in emerging populations to create ‘multi-crop’ diversity, which extended growing seasons and provided our ancient ancestors with food security.
The need to manage different crops in different locations, and the water resources required, depended upon elaborate social contracts and the rise of more settled, stratified communities and eventually complex ‘urban’ human societies.
Researchers say we need to learn from the earliest farmers when thinking about feeding today’s populations, and millet may have a role to play in protecting against modern crop failure and famine.
After a 400-year population boom, we need to reconnect with the Sun
By Tony Ryan, University of Sheffield
For almost all of our species’ 200,000-year history, man’s relationship with the Earth was no different to that of any other animal. All their energy was provided directly by the sun. Sunlight captured by plants using photosynthesis was converted into food and fuel. They ate roots, fruits and grains (and animals that also ate roots, fruits and grains) to provide their bodies with energy. They burned wood to keep themselves warm and fat to provide light at night.
It was a successful strategy for survival and over tens of thousands of years the human population spread across six continents.
However, locked in to this natural solar cycle, there was a limit to how many people their lifestyle could support, and the total number of inhabitants fluctuated below 500m depending on disease, wars and food supply.
Then, 350 years ago, everything changed. We began to supplement our energy needs with coal and oil (humans had been using coal since pre-historic times but not on a large scale). This was still energy from sunshine, but this time millions of years old. In less than two centuries the human population exploded, doubling in size to 1 billion people. It has continued to grow ever since, but the rate of change has increased significantly. It took 100,000 years to reach the first billion people: today we are adding a further billion every 12 years. The result is a huge squeeze on all natural resources. Over the next two decades we will witness huge increases in demand for energy, food and water – a perfect storm.
You can teach philosophy while you’re teaching farming, but you can’t teach farming while you’re teaching philosophy
The elephant in the room at Paris climate talks: Why food production must change
By Tim Lang, City University London and Rebecca Wells, City University London
The grand political narratives around the COP21 conference in Paris will barely touch on one crucial aspect – food. The Paris talks are of vital importance, not just for climate change itself but for framing what kind of food economy follows. And why does food matter for climate change? Well, it’s a major factor driving it yet barely gets a mention.
From growing food to processing and packaging it, from transporting to selling it, cooking it, eating it and throwing it away – the whole chain contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock alone makes up 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. And agriculture emissions have increased rapidly in the last decade, as global diets and tastes change. Deforestation and forest degradation (often because of agricultural expansion) cause an estimated 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
People used to argue that this was a regrettable cost of progress. But most analysts now think differently, reminding us that the current food system is failing many. Almost 800m people in the world are hungry, at least two billion are not getting enough nutrients, and 1.9 billon adults are overweight or obese (39% of all adults over 18 years of age). Meanwhile, a third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted.
World’s richest 10 per cent produce 50% of CO2
AFP reports: The richest 10 per cent of people produce half of Earth’s climate-harming fossil-fuel emissions, while the poorest half contribute a mere 10 per cent, British charity Oxfam said in a study released Wednesday.
Oxfam published the numbers as negotiators from 195 countries met in Paris to wrangle over a climate rescue pact.
Disputes over how to share responsibility for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions and aiding climate-vulnerable countries are among the thorniest and longest-running issues in the 25-year-old UN climate process.
“Rich, high emitters should be held accountable for their emissions, no matter where they live,” Oxfam climate policy head Tim Gore said in a statement.
“But it’s easy to forget that rapidly developing economies are also home to the majority of the world’s very poorest people and while they have to do their fair share, it is rich countries that should still lead the way.”
The report said that an average person among the richest one percent emits 175 times more carbon than his or her counterpart among the bottom 10 per cent.[Continue reading…]
Humans become different kinds of people when wrestling with deep problems
Jedediah Purdy discusses his new book, After Nature: Ross Andersen: For a relatively slim volume, this book distills an incredible amount of scholarship — about Americans’ changing attitudes toward the natural world, and about how those attitudes might change in the future. How long have you been thinking about this?
Jedediah Purdy: I started thinking about this project seven or eight years ago, when I was co-teaching a course at Duke on the law, science, and politics of climate change. What struck me then was how much of the scholarship involved very sophisticated analyses of futility. There were all these studies about why we should expect to do nothing: because climate change overruns our national borders, the timelines of our political decision-making, the scope of our moral concern, and even our cognition.
So I began thinking: This sounds familiar. Many of the ideas we take for granted now, at least as widely shared goals — democracy, gender equality, diversity, economic life without any form of slavery, overcoming the legacy of racism and even overcoming the myth of race itself — would have seemed impossible at many earlier times. In fact, they would have seemed unnatural. Not so long ago, the best minds believed they had seen the limits of human possibility, and those limits did not extend very far. And in a sense they were right. In fighting out these questions, humans became different kinds of people. They came to care about new and different things. The scope and shape of their moral communities changed.
So, I thought, maybe climate change — and, really, the whole global environmental crisis — is like that. Maybe it’s one of these deep problems that, if we engage it in a serious way, changes us. Maybe we need to become different people in relation to the natural world. And maybe that isn’t such a wildly utopian thought: that becoming different people is something that humans do, in wrestling with deep problems. [Continue reading…]
The antibiotic apocalypse has begun
BBC News reports: The world is on the cusp of a “post-antibiotic era”, scientists have warned after finding bacteria resistant to drugs used when all other treatments have failed.
They identified bacteria able to shrug off the drug of last resort – colistin – in patients and livestock in China.
They said that resistance would spread around the world and raised the spectre of untreatable infections.
It is likely resistance emerged after colistin was overused in farm animals.Bacteria becoming completely resistant to treatment – also known as the antibiotic apocalypse – could plunge medicine back into the dark ages. [Continue reading…]
The strange persistence of first languages
Julie Sedivy writes: Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention. When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention. The subconscious effort of suppressing this competition can slow the retrieval of words—and if the background language elbows its way to the forefront, the speaker may resort to code-switching, plunking down a word from one language into the sentence frame of another.
Meanwhile, the weaker language is more likely to become swamped; when resources are scarce, as they are during mental exhaustion, the disadvantaged language may become nearly impossible to summon. Over time, neglecting an earlier language makes it harder and harder for it to compete for access.
According to a 2004 survey conducted in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, fewer than half of people belonging to Generation 1.5 — immigrants who arrive before their teenage years — claimed to speak the language they were born into “very well.” A 2006 study of immigrant languages in Southern California forecast that even among Mexican Americans, the slowest group to assimilate within Southern California, new arrivals would live to hear only 5 out of every 100 of their great-grandchildren speak fluent Spanish.
When a childhood language decays, so does the ability to reach far back into your own private history. Language is memory’s receptacle. It has Proustian powers. Just as smells are known to trigger vivid memories of past experiences, language is so entangled with our experiences that inhabiting a specific language helps surface submerged events or interactions that are associated with it. [Continue reading…]
In a society where everyone is ready to defend the common good, corruption doesn’t pay
Suzanne Sadedin writes: By making a few alterations to the composition of the justice system, corrupt societies could be made to transition to a state called ‘righteousness’. In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order. They were everybody. When virtually all of society stood ready to defend the common good, corruption didn’t pay.
Among honeybees and several ant species, this seems to be the status quo: all the workers police one another, making corruption an unappealing choice. In fact, the study showed that even if power inequalities later re-appeared, corruption would not return. The righteous community was extraordinarily stable.
Not all societies could make the transition. But those that did would reap the benefits of true, lasting harmony. An early tribe that made the transition to righteousness might out-compete more corrupt rivals, allowing righteousness to spread throughout the species. Such tribal selection is uncommon among animals other than eusocial insects, but many researchers think it could have played a role in human evolution. Hunter-gatherer societies commonly tend toward egalitarianism, with social norms enforced by the whole group rather than any specially empowered individuals. [Continue reading…]
It’s completely ridiculous to think that humans could live on Mars
Danielle and Astro Teller write: Our 12-year-old daughter who, like us, is a big fan of The Martian by Andy Weir, said, “I can’t stand that people think we’re all going to live on Mars after we destroy our own planet. Even after we’ve made the Earth too hot and polluted for humans, it still won’t be as bad as Mars. At least there’s plenty of water here, and the atmosphere won’t make your head explode.”
What makes The Martian so wonderful is that the protagonist survives in a brutally hostile environment, against all odds, by exploiting science in clever and creative ways. To nerds like us, that’s better than Christmas morning or a hot fudge sundae. (One of us is nerdier than the other — I’m not naming any names, but his job title is “Captain of Moonshots.”) The idea of using our ingenuity to explore other planets is thrilling. Our daughter has a good point about escaping man-made disaster on Earth by colonizing Mars, though. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Mars has almost no surface water; a toxic atmosphere that is too thin for humans to survive without pressure suits; deadly solar radiation; temperatures lower than Antarctica; and few to none of the natural resources that have been critical to human success on Earth. Smart people have proposed solutions for those pesky environmental issues, some of which are seriously sci-fi, like melting the polar ice caps with nuclear bombs. But those aren’t even the real problems.
The real problems have to do with human nature and economics. First, we live on a planet that is perfect for us, and we seem to be unable to prevent ourselves from making it less and less habitable. We’re like a bunch of teenagers destroying our parents’ mansion in one long, crazy party, figuring that our backup plan is to run into the forest and build our own house. We’ll worry about how to get food and a good sound system later. Proponents of Mars colonization talk about “terraforming” Mars to make it more like Earth, but in the meantime, we’re “marsforming” Earth by making our atmosphere poisonous and annihilating our natural resources. We are also well on our way to making Earth one big desert, just like Mars. [Continue reading…]
Climate change is a reverse Robin Hood: stealing from the poor countries and giving to the rich ones
Quartz reports: Just when you thought the news about climate change couldn’t get any worse, consider this.
Not only will global warming put a massive dent in the world’s GDP over the coming decades, but it “is essentially a massive transfer of value from the hot parts of the world to the cooler parts of the world,” according to a new study in Nature. “This is like taking from the poor and giving to the rich.”
Researchers Stanford University analyzed 166 countries over a 50-year period (from 1960 to 2010) and compared economic output when country’s experienced normal temperature to abnormally cold or warm temperatures. Controlling for factors such as geography, economic changes, and global trade shifts, they found the optimum temperature where humans are good at producing stuff: 55ºF (13ºC).
Applying this finding to climate change forecasts, they found that 77% of countries will experience a decline in per capita incomes by 2099, with the average person’s income shrinking by 23%. Unusually high temperatures will hurt agriculture, economic production, and overall health, researchers say. [Continue reading…]
Sino-Tibetan populations shed light on human cooperation
One of the big questions in anthropology is why humans, unlike most animals, cooperate with those we are not closely related to. Exactly what has driven this behaviour is not well understood. Anthropologists suspect it could be down to the fact that women have usually left their homes after marriage to go and live with their husband’s family. This creates links between distant families, which may explain our tendency to cooperate beyond our own households.
Now our study on the Tibetan borderlands of China, published in Nature Communications, shows that it is indeed the case that cooperation is greater in populations where females disperse for marriage.
A natural experiment in social structure
There are a lot of different theories about the link between dispersal, kinship and cooperation, which is what we wanted to test. Anthropologists believe that dispersal leads to cooperation through links between families, and some evolutionary models predict that when nobody moves this leads to residents competing for the same resources and greater conflict between kin. But there are also models that suggest the opposite is true – that if nobody moves, neighbours are more likely to be related, leading to more cooperation in the neighbourhood.
