Best bets for two big crises

Maybe we can get through the climate crisis without a global catastrophe. And maybe we can cope with the loss of jobs caused by the revolution in robotics and artificial intelligence, or AI, without a social and political calamity. But can we do both at once?

We should know how to deal with the AI revolution, because we have been down this road before. It’s a bit different this time, of course, in that the original Industrial Revolution in 1780–1850 created as many new jobs in manufacturing as it destroyed in cottage industries and skilled trades.

AI, by contrast, is not producing enough replacement jobs, but it is making us wealthier. The value of manufactured goods doubled in the United States in the past 30 years even as the number of good industrial jobs fell by 1⁄3, with 8 million jobs gone. Maybe we could use that extra wealth to ease the transition to a job-scarce future.

The climate emergency is unlike any challenge we have faced before. Surmounting it would require an unprecedented level of global cooperation and big changes in how people consume and behave, neither of which human beings have historically been good at.

These two crises are already interacting. The erosion of middle-class jobs and the stagnation of real wage levels generates anger that is already creating populist, authoritarian regimes around the world. These regimes despise international cooperation and often deny climate change as well – Trump in the US, Bolsonaro in Brazil.

So what can we do about all this? The first thing is to recognise we cannot plot a course that takes us to ultimate safety maybe 50 years from now.

We can plan to get through the next five years. But we can’t steer a safe course to 2070, any more than intelligent decision-makers in 1790 could have planned how to get to 1840 without much upheaval. They might have seen steam engines, but they would have had no idea what a railroad was.

We are in the same position as those people with regard to AI and the global environmental emergency, which extends far beyond ‘‘climate change’’, although that is at its heart. We know a good deal about both issues, but not enough to be confident about our choices – and besides, they may well mutate and head off in unforeseen directions as the crises deepen.

But there are two big things we can do right now. We need to stop the slide into increasingly authoritarian governments, because we are not going to stop the spread of AI. And we have to win more time to get our greenhouse gas emissions under control because we are certainly going to go through 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent, which would give us a 2 degrees Celsius higher average global temperature.

The best bet for getting our politics back on track is a guaranteed minimum income high enough to keep everybody comfortable, whether they are working or not. That is well within the reach of any developed country’s economy and has the benefit of putting enough money into people’s pockets to save everybody’s business model.

And the best way to win more time on the climate front is to start geo-engineering – direct intervention in the atmosphere to hold the global temperature down -– as soon as we get anywhere near +2C. To be ready then, we need to be doing open-air testing on a small scale now.

There will be howls of protest from the right about a guaranteed minimum income, and from the greener parts of the left about geo-engineering.

However, both will probably be indispensable if we want to get through these huge changes without mass casualties or even civilisational collapse.