
On Monday 20th January 2025, Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as US President. Trump wasted no time in bringing the entire world closer to civilisational collapse, signing a slew of Executive Orders after his inauguration. Among these are disastrous rollbacks on addressing the climate emergency, and preventing algorithmic extinction.
It’s depressing that these gigantic leaps backward come just one week after Keir Starmer promised to “unleash” AI across the UK, enabling the tech industry to run roughshod and amass greater wealth, all at our expense.
Both sides of the Atlantic are witnessing foolish decisions, and it’s hard to avoid imagining that they may just herald the beginning of the end for humanity. Below are some of Trump’s first day failures, initiated through Executive Orders.
The climate crisis
Numerous Executive Orders were signed that will accelerate climate breakdown. The most notable of which was Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Paris climate agreement. This is the second time that Trump has withdrawn from the world’s only agreement to tackle the climate crisis, which aimed to keep global temperature rises ideally below 1.5C, and no more than 2C.
Having already surpassed the 1.5C threshold for a full year, the agreement was already on life support. But, now it appears in far greater jeopardy, given that the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases has withdrawn from it. David Smith writes in the Guardian, that the US now becomes just one of four countries that aren’t signed up to the agreement, alongside Libya, Iran, and Yemen. The withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is part of Trump’s goal to end Biden’s Green New Deal.
Unfortunately, Trump’s predecessor wasn’t much better when it came to his climate record. Biden, oversaw record levels of oil and gas production. He also issued 758 oil and gas licences last year – another new shocking record.
Another order saw Trump declare a national energy emergency. As part of this, gas exports will be given the green light after they’d been paused, and restrictions will be lifted on drilling in Alaska. At risk is the Arctic national wildlife refuge (ANWR), a 19m-acre region which is home to species including polar bears. Permits for fossil fuel infrastructure will also be easier to obtain, given that these will be fast-tracked.
Electric vehicle targets were also in the firing line. Biden aimed for 50% of all new vehicles to be electric by 2030. This target has now been revoked. In addition, it’s believed that Trump wishes to weaken pollution standards for vehicles.
The AI crisis
In 2023, Joe Biden issued an Executive Order to tackle AI risks associated with workers, consumers, and national security. It also aimed to tackle the risks posed by AI related to nuclear, radiological, biological, and chemical weapons. He issued the order because lawmakers failed to get legislation across the line regarding AI guardrails. Under this order, AI developers had to share safety test results with the government, prior to public release. Trump has now revoked this order.
Summary
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but when industries aren’t regulated, terrible things happen. The pesticides industry got away with poisoning everything, until Rachel Carson released Silent Spring and people began making the connection between toxic pesticides and a multitude of health issues including cancer. The tobacco industry muddied the water for decades by denying the link between smoking and cancer, and countless lives were lost as a result. The CFC industry continued producing CFCs and expanding the hole in the ozone layer, despite growing scientific warnings. The fossil fuel industry has ignored and lobbied hard against 37 years of scientific warnings about the climate emergency and has driven us towards climate chaos. Now experts are urgently warning about the dangers of AI, but those warnings have fallen on deaf ears and we face the real risk of algorithmic extinction (up to a 20% chance of human extinction in 30 years according to Geoffrey Hinton).
Our politicians have made it clear that they don’t care about society, but rather about the corporations lining their pockets. It should come as no surprise that the fossil fuel industry placed their bets on Trump with a $75m campaign donation.
Our democracies are fundamentally broken. To quote Abraham Lincoln, what we desperately need is “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The best way I can see that happening is through participatory democracy, which gives citizens’ the opportunity to determine our collective future. Citizens’ assemblies are a great example of this, and urgently need to be run on an international and national basis to give politicians society’s mandate for acting on the climate and AI crises.
Change must happen, and it needs to do so urgently. For as the past week has shown, the leaders of the US and the UK are seeking to take us beyond the point of no return. At this rate, that could bring about the end of the human era, which is something that a growing number of experts are warning about.
Such is the magnitude of our novel, and worsening, predicament.
Template – General E-mail for Contacting Political Representatives About AI
Dear
I’m writing in regards to the rapid advances in AI and related technologies, which pose massive threats to society, jobs, arts and culture, democracy, privacy, and our collective civilisation.
Many AI systems are trained on copyrighted data and this has been done without consent or compensation. The way that machine learning works is flawed and this means that control hasn’t been designed into AI, which could create unimaginable problems further down the line. But AI isn’t just a future threat. The large language models (LLMs) already in the public domain threaten the livelihoods of writers and authors. AI image, video and audio generators pose risks to the jobs of artists, actors, and musicians. When combined together, these types of AI can have a devastating impact on democracy, and ‘deepfakes’ could be used by malicious actors for cybercrime purposes.
Both AI and the introduction of robots into the workforce jeopardises jobs on a scale like never before. By one estimate, up to a billion jobs could be lost, with only around ten million new jobs created. Mass unemployment could result, leading to social unrest, extreme poverty, and skyrocketing homelessness.
Through neurotechnology, it’s already possible to create an image of what people are thinking about – the ultimate invasion of thought privacy. Killer robots have been deployed around the world over the last few years, and can be easily made and sold on the black market, threatening our collective safety. Meanwhile AGI poses an existential risk to our civilisation.
We have a limited period of time to act before AI becomes so embedded in modern life, that it can’t be extricated. I therefore urge you to act swiftly in outright banning the technology or holding a global citizens’ assembly on AI and using the guidelines that emerge to implement stringent regulations that forever protect and safeguard humanity.
With concern and expectation,
Selected AI Resources
Books
- Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell
- Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
- The Alignment Problem: How Can Machines Learn Human Values? by Brian Christian
- The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman
- Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat
- Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia
- Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? By Bill McKibben
- For the Good of the World by A.C. Grayling
- Permanent Record by Edward Snowden
- The People Vs Tech: How the Internet is Killing Democracy (and how we save it) by Jamie Bartlett
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
- Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
Articles
- Stuart Russell – AI has much to offer humanity. It could also wreak terrible harm. It must be controlled
- Dan Milmo – ‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years
- Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin – You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills
- Jeremy Lent – To Counter AI Risk, We Must Develop an Integrated Intelligence
- Alex Hern – Interview – ‘We’ve discovered the secret of immortality. The bad news is it’s not for us’: why the godfather of AI fears for humanity
- Yuval Noah Harari – ‘Never summon a power you can’t control’: Yuval Noah Harari on how AI could threaten democracy and divide the world
- Naomi Klein – AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are
- Yuval Noah Harari – Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation
- Eliezer Yudkowsky – Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down
- Jonathan Freedland – The future of AI is chilling – humans have to act together to overcome this threat to civilisation
- Daniel Kehlmann – Not yet panicking about AI? You should be – there’s little time left to rein it in
- Ian Hogarth – We must slow down the race to God-like AI
- Harry de Quetteville – Yuval Noah Harari: ‘I don’t know if humans can survive AI’
- Lucas Mearian – Q&A: Google’s Geoffrey Hinton — humanity just a ‘passing phase’ in the evolution of intelligence
- Sigal Samuel – AI companies are trying to build god. Shouldn’t they get our permission first?
- James Bradley – AI isn’t about unleashing our imaginations, it’s about outsourcing them. The real purpose is profit
- Alex Hern and Dan Milmo – Man v machine: everything you need to know about AI
- Society of Authors – Publishers demand that tech companies seek consent before using copyright-protected works to develop AI systems
- Alex Clark and Melissa Mahtani – Google AI chatbot responds with a threatening message: “Human … Please die.”
- The Guardian (Editorial) – The Guardian view on AI’s power, limits, and risks: it may require rethinking the technology
- Nick Robins-Early – OpenAI and Google DeepMind workers warn of AI industry risks in open letter
- Ryan Mizzen – AI and the Techopalypse
- Ryan Mizzen – 31 Reasons to Boycott AI
- Ryan Mizzen – Boycott Generative AI Before AI Makes Your Career Boycott You
- Ryan Mizzen – Terminology for the AI Crisis
- Ryan Mizzen – Mainlining AI? More Like Mainlining Disaster. An Analysis of the Labour Government’s AI Plans
- Ryan Mizzen – Results from the Society of Authors’ AI Survey 2024
- Ryan Mizzen – The Creator – Review
Podcast
Video
- Ozzy Man Reviews – Who is Real Anymore!? AI
Other
- Pause AI campaign
- Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
- A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence
- Restrict AI Illustration from Publishing: An Open Letter
- Statement on AI training
- Statement on AI Risk
- Open Letter to Generative AI Leaders
- Call to Lead
- Autonomous Weapons Open Letter: AI & Robotics Researchers
- Lethal Autonomous Weapons Pledge
- Stop Killer Robots
- Amnesty International – Stop Killer Robots
- autonomousweapons.org
My cli-fi children’s picture book, Nanook and the Melting Arctic is available from Amazon’s global stores including Amazon UK and Amazon US. My eco-fiction children’s picture book, Hedgey-A and the Honey Bees about how pesticides affect bees, is available on Amazon’s global stores including Amazon UK and Amazon US.