Breaking Green

Artificial Intelligence and Generative Biology with Jim Thomas

• Global Justice Ecology Project / Host Steve Taylor • Season 4 • Episode 9

Share episode

Send us a text

What is artificial intelligence and how are some corporate interests seeking to hand over the development of genetically engineered organisms to it?

Join us as we unpack this question with Jim Thomas, an activist and researcher who challenges the common misconceptions about artificial intelligence. We delve into the historical context of the Luddites and connect their resistance to harmful industrialization with the emerging technological challenges we face today. Our discussion takes a critical angle on how AI intersects with indigenous rights, spotlighting the recent establishment of the CALI Fund at COP16 in Colombia, which aims to ensure fair compensation for the genetic information used by big tech companies.

The world of synthetic biology and genetic engineering is rapidly evolving, with technologies like CRISPR and DNA printing poised to reshape agriculture and ecosystems. But what ethical and ecological concerns arise from this transformation? We explore the commodification of biodiversity and the implications of merging these advancements with AI, leading to new bioeconomies. The financialization of nature, through initiatives like biodiversity credits, raises significant questions about sustainability, colonialism and the commercialization of genomic data. As we navigate these complex issues, we emphasize the urgent need for societal oversight to safeguard the common good.

This podcast is produced by Global Justice Ecology Project.

Breaking Green is made possible by tax deductible donations from people like you. Please help us lift up the voices of those working to protect forests, defend human rights and expose false solutions.  

Donate securely online here

Or simply text GIVE to 716-257-4187

Note: This episode's image was created with openart.ai. We found the result interesting, but do we want to use it to create new organisms and hand over our collective future to artificial intelligence?

Steve Taylor:

Welcome to Breaking Green, a podcast by Global Justice Ecology Project. On Breaking Green, we will talk with activists and experts to examine the intertwined issues of social, ecological and economic injustice. We will also explore some of the more outrageous proposals to address climate and environmental crises that are falsely being sold as green. I am your host, steve Taylor. This October, the 16th Conference of Parties of the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity convened in Cali, colombia. Global Justice Ecology Project was there to mobilize against the release of genetically engineered trees. At COP16, there was the establishment of the so-called CALI Fund, which requires big tech companies working with artificial intelligence to compensate indigenous peoples and traditional communities for use of their genetic information in the development of generative biological programs. But what is generative biology and why are observers now saying that we are at a tipping point where a lack of regulatory oversight and the use of artificial intelligence now threatens the release of novel organisms into the wild?

Steve Taylor:

On this episode of Breaking Green, we will talk with Jim Thomas. Jim Thomas is an activist, writer, researcher and poet with almost three decades of international experience tracking emerging technologies, ecological change, biodiversity and food systems on behalf of movements and UN fora on which he serves. Jim was a co-executive director and research director at the ETC Collective, jim Thomas, welcome to Breaking Green. Thanks very much. So, jim, you have an interesting bio. You have been working on environmental, food sovereignty and social justice issues for oh, I don't know about three decades. What drew you to these issues and how did you get started in this work? And how did you get started in this work?

Jim Thomas:

How did I get started in this work? I think, like many people, love for the natural world, concern about the way in which industrial capitalism although I might not have called it that at the beginning is crushing the natural world, and particularly the role of technology and corporations in that. And so, yeah, I've been lucky enough for about three decades to be fighting against corporate power, particularly technological power, and working a lot against the effects of new and risky emerging technologies and the corporate strategies behind it.

Steve Taylor:

I noticed in your bio that you helped form something called the New Luddites, so could you tell us a little bit about that, what the Luddites are and how you think that may be relevant to the work that you do?

Jim Thomas:

Sure. So the Luddites were working people in the north of England in the beginning of the 19th century who saw the onset of industrialization and how it was affecting their craft they were mostly weavers and their communities and began to smash some of the machines that were hurting the commonality was the language they used. They saw machinery that was hurtful to the commonality and they organized as a movement that actually was so powerful that it required more soldiers than were sent to France to fight Napoleon. It was a huge social movement at the time. They were crushed, they were hung, they were transported to Australia and, of course, the word Luddite has since become a word of contempt for anyone who's supposedly fearful of progress and technology.

Jim Thomas:

But that's not what the Luddites originally were introduced by a particular industrial class, a brand new industrial class, were harming their communities, were harming their craft and pushed back against it. And I think the important thing and this is certainly why I was involved with others around starting a new Luddites was the fact that they recognized that technologies that were hurtful to the common good, that they recognized that technologies that were hurtful to the common good shouldn't be allowed to go ahead and they literally would pull weaving frames into the marketplace and put them on trial, and people would say what they thought whether these weaving frames should exist or not exist, and then they would smash them or not smash them. They were exercising judgment over these new technologies and exercising judgment from the point of view of the social effects, the effects on community, and that's something that many of our movements have been trying to do as well more recently.

Steve Taylor:

It is a fascinating history and I think it's really cool that you guys started that. And if you ever want to read a little bit about that, the listener can go and just Google the new Luddites and I think you'll find some news stories.

Jim Thomas:

I would really point people to. There's a bit of a resurgence at the moment, particularly in the context of artificial intelligence, of people who are saying no, wait a minute, I'm a Luddite too. There's a really wonderful story of the Luddites produced by a journalist called Brian Merchant. He's produced a book called Blood in the Machine, which is the history of the Luddites, but it connects it directly to some of the resistance movements now against artificial intelligence and digital technology and biotechnologies. So there's more and more people who are critically considering technologies, calling themselves Luddites. Again, it's a reclaimed word.

Steve Taylor:

You mentioned AI and your work recently has been dealing a lot with that at COP I believe it was COP 16, but the recent COP in Cali we're going to get to that. But let's start with just the concept of artificial intelligence as a new technology and as a new Luddite your thoughts.

Jim Thomas:

Yes, I mean, I think a place to start is to understand what so-called artificial intelligence, ai, is and what it isn't. So the term artificial intelligence was originally a marketing term from the 1950s and it was a very smart marketing term, but it doesn't really mean anything but what's today called AI, artificial intelligence the likes of chat, gpt and so forth. It's not intelligent. This isn't thinking machines. We're not talking about smart robots or smart computers that can think unusual things. That's an image that's been projected by this industry and it really is an industry in order to sell themselves and to look impressive. Really, all artificial intelligence is is very complicated sorting of data in order to make predictions. So an artificial intelligence system will take large amounts of data. It will use that to build a model and on that model it will try to predict things. It will try to predict what's the next word that it might spit out, and that's how chat GPT works, for example, for those who've used that. So it looks like it creates new text, but it's really just trying to predict what it is you want it to say.

Jim Thomas:

Or these artificial intelligence, so-called image machines which take lots of images, scrape them off the internet and then, when you ask it to make something. It tries to predict what is the image that you would like and, in many ways, what artificial intelligence is and it's been classified this way is kind of a bullshit machine. It's literally something that's trying to guess what you want to hear and that, of course, produces texts. It produces images, it produces things that can look very impressive, but they're just very complicated sorting and predictions, and some significant portion of the time, those predictions are wrong and certainly those predictions are not thinking. They're literally just trying to predict what you want to hear. That ability to do that to predict words or images and produce what look like new texts or new pictures or new videos is, of course, something that this industry is now selling to the public, to militaries, to the government, um, as as a as if it was magic. Um, you know, many, many technologies try to sell themselves as magic, and AI is the latest in the long line.

Steve Taylor:

It's clear. You're not saying that AI is some sort of malevolent intelligence or has any cognizance or anything like that. What you're saying is that it's good at scraping data, and I think that's going to be relevant to our conversation. It's good at scraping data, and I think that's going to be relevant to our conversation. It's good at scraping data and being predictive and sorting through just tons of data, like maybe DNA strands. Right, there's a lot of data in DNA strands. So tell us now. I mean, we're not just going to talk about AI, we're going to talk about how AI may be given a new role when it comes to something called generative biology.

Jim Thomas:

Sure. So those who are familiar with so-called AI artificial intelligence at the moment, and many of us are using it, whether we choose to or not, and many of us are using it whether we choose to or not. I used to its use for text, for chatbots such as ChatGPT, or that little kind of AI overview that now turns up at the front of Google or making images of ourselves, these kind of things and there has been many hundreds of billions of dollars being put into this industry by venture capital, by large banks and investors, and they're getting a little bit antsy because the amount of money that they're putting in, that they're spending trillions on building new data centers, isn't really coming back with anything. That is very impressive, and so they're looking for something that looks like it's a real breakthrough. And one area where companies such as Google or Microsoft or OpenAI are trying to do that is in the area of genetic engineering.

Jim Thomas:

The argument is that, yeah, yeah, we have chatbots that can generate supposedly new text and new images, but we can also generate new viruses, we can generate new organisms, we can generate new proteins and we could generate new chemicals that could be drugs or they could be new materials, and so this area of generative biology is sort of quietly exploding right now and, just as the sort of AI you have in chat GPT is based on scraping all the text off of the internet, this generative biology AI starts with scraping all the DNA sequences that they can get.

Jim Thomas:

The GTCAT the language of genes, so-called is all being sequenced and put up on databases and all of that is now being used as the training for AI models. And then the companies such as NVIDIA or Microsoft or Google will say make me a protein that is red and thermally stable, or make me a virus that does this or a bacteria that does that, and the AI will try to generate the code for building that particular living organism or protein or virus. So we're moving from generating pictures and text to moving to generating living organisms, proteins and things that are biologically active in our environment.

Steve Taylor:

So I guess you would take this technology, the capability to be predictive when it comes to the genetic code, and combine that with, maybe, crispr. That's an interesting thought. It's a scary one. What are your thoughts on this?

Jim Thomas:

Yeah, so we've been talking a little bit about artificial intelligence and digital things, but if you move over to the world of biology, the ability to genetically engineer biology in the world has really shifted in the last 20 years. Whereas 20 years ago we were talking about genetically modified soybeans and corn and things like that, where you would cut out a piece of DNA and move it across, now, as you mentioned, you have technologies such as CRISPR, where you can just directly change the code of an organism at the genetic level, or you can just print out the DNA you want on a DNA printer. This is very common now, and so this whole what's called synthetic biology area, the kind of upgrading of genetic engineering, opens up the opportunity to start changing the microbes that are in the soil, the microbes that are in your body, the insects, as you say, that are affecting how ecosystems work, the trees, everything. Everything becomes kind of editable and changeable at the genetic level, and you have what's being called a convergence between, on the one hand, this very strong biotechnology tools and artificial intelligence which, through this generative biology, can say here are the codes you need to change, as if you're changing the code of a computer program, but you're supposedly changing the code of life such that you can get any number of different outcomes, and that's a tremendous power.

Jim Thomas:

Of course, governments are both very concerned about other governments being able to develop new bioweapons, but also they want to control that ability. They want to be able to make new powerful weapons or toxins and so forth make new powerful weapons or toxins and so forth. But in many ways it's more serious when you think about how you can now start to reproduce proteins and chemicals this way that would have been grown by farmers. You can recreate vanilla or you can recreate saffron, and in doing so you can take over those areas of production and put them into vats so you can start moving farmers off of the land. You can start really significantly changing how things are produced in our economy, and that's the real power behind this is changing the basic production of our everyday needs.

Steve Taylor:

So, jim, when it comes to your knowledge, when it comes to your knowledge about this, you actually have an official capacity at the UN, with a group that monitors such technology. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Jim Thomas:

Yeah, I mean, for the past decade I've been sitting on an expert group that tracks this area of synthetic biology, the new ways of doing genetic engineering. So I sit on that at the Convention on Biological Diversity, and that expert group, which is made up of experts from different governments, has been particularly saying we need to have better horizon scanning and assessment of these new technologies and what they mean for biodiversity, for their impact on communities, especially indigenous communities, and in fact have been particularly waving a flag on artificial intelligence and generative biology. That's the way I know about that. So, yeah, and we, along with others I've been involved with trying to bring these topics to the Convention on Biological Diversity and other UN spaces.

Steve Taylor:

It's a fascinating subject. It's a very scary one because I know that there's been somewhat of a fundamental shift is what I'm hearing when it comes to the COP.

Jim Thomas:

What I would say about that is and this goes to how these technologies are going to be employed Increasingly, there is an industrial interest in trying to turn nature into a sort of financialized market. So, on the one hand, can we genetically engineer and alter nature so that it will take up more carbon dioxide and sequester more carbon dioxide, can we change other natural processes such that we can financialize them as carbon credits or biodiversity credits, and so there's a lot of high-tech industries that are now swarming around the Biodiversity Convention looking to see the opportunity to sell artificial intelligence services, new genetic engineering technologies and also carbon credits and biodiversity credits, that this is sort of seen as a new economy, what they're calling a new bioeconomy, and these are the technologies that will enable that and enable them to take lots of money in the process of trying to build that different economy.

Steve Taylor:

Enable them to take lots of money in the process of trying to build that different economy. Could you tell us a little bit about how maybe this notion of using artificial intelligence and genetic engineering to help biodiversity might be lining people's pockets more than helping biodiversity or preserving biodiversity?

Jim Thomas:

Yeah, and I would say I think our movements, particularly climate justice movements, have become familiar with the way in which carbon credits and carbon finance, climate finance, is being used to drive these false solutions. But one thing I heard somebody in this world say you know well climate is Ken, but biodiversity that's Barbie. Climate is Ken, but biodiversity that's Barbie. The potential to develop new technologies and sell them, the potential to securitize not just carbon but also other parts of biodiversity, even the actual diversity of biological material in one area or different conservation areas, and water cycles and nitrogen it sort of becomes like a playground for those who want to financialize. So, to be very specific, if you can create genetically engineered organisms that will change the nitrogen cycle or that will supposedly sequester more carbon, or you can genetically engineer insects that will remove invasive species by killing off certain invasive species, then all of that could be first of all sold, and so you've got to make money there. But if you can put biodiversity credits alongside that and you can claim that you're increasing biodiversity and therefore your biodiversity credits are worth more, then you've got another market.

Jim Thomas:

There's a third kind of market going on, which is in the DNA itself. So it used to be that you had bioprospecting or biopiracy companies who would scoop up DNA and send it abroad. But now they scoop up DNA from communities, from waters, from soils, and they sequence it and they put it in these databanks, and that digital version of DNA this is what's called digital sequence information is now the raw materials for building new genetically engineered things, and so that's actually what you're training these AI models on. So DSI, this digital sequence information, is becoming a new type of commodity, and this mirrors what's happening in the economy more generally, where data is the new oil, basically, and there's no bigger amount of data than genomic data. There's literally trillions of letters of GTC&A out there that you could put in to sell and trade in, if you can make an economy around that. Of course, it's a highly speculative economy, but that doesn't really matter if you're just trying to make some money in it.

Steve Taylor:

Well, what's interesting about this is the carbon credits, the plans, the 30 by 30 often disproportionately impacts the global south, the indigenous people, who are going to be our traditional communities, who are going to be moved off the land, when they're the ones who have a culture, a lifestyle that promotes biodiversity, that nurtures biodiversity, and are not the leading cause of climate change. So we put an undue burden on these communities and indigenous peoples. Would that be any different with what's happening with this generative biology?

Jim Thomas:

and ocean communities, who have really stewarded biodiversity, who have developed the plants and the animals and the breeds and the seeds that are the basis of people's food security and their cultures. And that's now what the companies first of all the biotech companies and now the AI companies want to plunder, and they want to take that and use that to train their ais in order to produce new products to sell. And then they'll tell us that those new products that they're selling are the solutions, these kind of single bullet, technical solutions, um, but, but they don't. You know that ignores, first of all, the knowledge of the people who actually develop what's in place, and it ultimately will move them out the way, because it will be putting in place monoculture, agriculture or agribusiness and these kind of private conservation models that you mentioned, about 30 by 30.

Steve Taylor:

models that you mentioned about 30 by 30. So there is definitely a continuum. As always with these new technologies, they start by taking and extracting and then, once they've extracted what they need, they move out of the way that people who actually they extracted from. So I think it's the same old story, it seems to me there was a fundamental shift during the Cali cop.

Jim Thomas:

Yeah, so there's been a long discussion within the Convention on Biological Diversity about the problem of biopiracy, where the global north and industrial companies try to take biological materials whether that's genes or seeds or breeds and then industrialize them and profit off them without giving any benefit back to the communities who first held them. And usually they just take and steal those resources. And so within the convention there's been this idea of what's called access and benefit sharing, that if you're going to access these genetic resources, then you're going to have to make an agreement to share the benefits back to those who originally developed them. And that was set up under something called the Nagoya Protocol, which basically required that if you're going to take DNA or seeds from one country and move it to another part of the world, then you need to have prior informed consent, you need to have some material, agreed transfer agreements and promise that you're going to give some benefit back. And that was already problematic because it didn't actually necessarily give communities the opportunity to say no, you just can't take it. This is going to hurt us.

Jim Thomas:

But with the advent of digital methods of turning DNA into data, and now with things like CRISPR, and particularly this artificial intelligence and generative biology. It all got circumvented. Now you could scrape DNA from anywhere in the world, you can upload it to the cloud, so-called and then it frees those companies of this obligation. So something that actually happened in Kali was an agreement, which has been 10 years in the making, to force well, theoretically to force companies who are taking digital sequences and industrializing them and getting a profit off of them to have to pay something back. So they said, if you're a company of a certain size and you use this digital DNA information, then you should pay back to indigenous peoples and others from whom this was taken into a, into a fund, what was called the Carly fund, and so that's. That's actually something that got established.

Jim Thomas:

It's not clear yet, um, how many companies are really going to pay into this. It says they should do this, but it doesn't like force them. Um, the good news is, a decision was made that AI companies, artificial intelligence companies, have actually got to pay into this. They should pay 1% of their profits or 0.1% of their sales into this fund, and that fund should give monies back to indigenous communities.

Jim Thomas:

There's many devils in the detail. Theoretically, that means that there should be billions of dollars coming from the likes of Microsoft and Google and NVIDIA these big AI companies back to indigenous peoples, but how that's going to be handled, whether any of that will actually get to the communities whose DNA, andna and data has been stolen, that's all got to be worked out. And it kind of doesn't fully address the bigger problem, which is that there is this different economy being put together which you know, which which might end up moving indigenous people and communities off the land in order to have biodiversity credits and carbon credits and closed conservation areas. It would be terrible if what the Kali Fund allows is basically sort of legitimates this new digital bioeconomy. So it's a double-edged sword.

Steve Taylor:

Yeah, it does sound like it. It sounds like a voluntary enforcement mechanism.

Jim Thomas:

It would be a bit more than voluntary, because there are definitely southern countries, brazil, india and many of the African countries who are going to push hard to try and force those companies to pay. How about the US? So the US, of course, isn't a party to the Convention on Biodiversity and most of these companies are based in the US and the US has said, especially under the incoming administration, we're not going to make them pay. But those companies, whether it's Microsoft, Google and so on, also operate in every other part of the world, and the European Union, for example, has already indicated that they think big tech companies should pay into the Kali Fund and they've got a bit of a history in making Microsoft, google and others pay antitrust monies. So maybe there'll be some money.

Steve Taylor:

Isn't there some principle regarding the introduction of new organisms into the environment that is of concern to the UN body?

Jim Thomas:

So the Convention on Biological Diversity has for is even a protocol the biosafety protocol at the convention, which is about trying to enforce the precautionary principle around genetically engineered organisms. The problem we're seeing is that the biotech industry has more and more successfully convinced European and obviously US and other governments to clear away the precautionary principle. They've really sold biotechnology and now artificial intelligence as the sort of future for economies and that anything that stands in the way is going to keep countries behind in a sort of high-tech race for innovation. And these kind of languages now very, very visible in what should be an environmental and ecological convention, but it's looking more and more like a trade fair between governments. So there's definitely a problem here with the sort of surging power of the biotech industry, and there's almost no industry that's more powerful than the AIotech industry and there's almost no industry that's more powerful than the AI and tech industry.

Steve Taylor:

You play around with artificial programs, you know. Ask them to create a picture, you get all these errors.

Jim Thomas:

I mean yeah and that's a that's a very good point that about a third of so called generative AI output has these errors. They're called hallucinations. That's built into them. That's just how they work. So you end up with pictures with six fingers or people who have kind of extra arms and things like that, and that's funny when you're looking at a picture. It's not so funny if you're creating a new organism, a bacteria, a virus that's going to get out in the environment. So there's a real urgent need for putting precaution when you're using these sort of bullshit production technologies.

Steve Taylor:

Almost feels like we need to slow this down, doesn't? It Sounds like we need to slow this down, but it's the opposite. I mean, the big tech tech bro oligarchy is just running away with things. Billionaires who want to escape the planet go to Mars when we can't take care of this one. I'm just not getting a good feeling about it.

Jim Thomas:

You're exactly right that we're now seeing that surging power of the sort of the tech bros, the brologarchy, as some people have called them taking over Washington and so forth. But I think there are places where people can resist. For example, for artificial intelligence to work, or seem to work, they need these massive data centers, these huge warehouses of computers, and the AI data industry is now putting a trillion dollars into trying to build out enough data centers to run all of their AI programs. And where are they placing them? They're placing them on the edge of cities. They're placing them in the countryside around cities. They're placing them in places where people can fight them.

Jim Thomas:

To be honest, these data centers are using incredible amounts of water. They're using incredible amounts of energy. They're producing incredible amounts of pollution, because they actually do often run on gas and other things, all of which communities can fight against. Every time you do a chat GPT search or not search a question to chat GPT, it's the equivalent of pouring away a bottle of water. In fact, it may be more than that.

Jim Thomas:

The energy use is just through the roof in terms of. It's currently something like about two to three percent of all global electricity is going to data centers, but it's going to be about nine percent of all electricity by 2030 in North America, and so that's blowing through all of our climate goals and so forth, and so there's good reasons for communities to say no, you can't do this. You can't be building these big AI clouds. They're not clouds, they're pretty heavy right in the middle of our communities, taking our water away from our farms and from our biodiversity, taking our electricity and energy that should be for our hospitals and our schools and causing pollution be for our hospitals and our schools and causing pollution. This is actually a front line where communities can fight back and they might win. Honestly, I think that's a place we can fight.

Steve Taylor:

I don't hear a lot about AI when it comes to government oversight. Am I missing it? Are you seeing it in other countries? In the United States, AI can do no wrong.

Jim Thomas:

Yeah, I think the problem is governments have been very much told that AI is the future for their economies and that they have to be locked into a race. There's a race between China and the US and Europe and Russia and Brazil and India, and they're all trying to have a place in that AI future. The European Union has an AI Act which is beginning to do some regulation. The Biden administration brought in an executive order which had some oversight not very much and that's about to be ripped up by the Trump administration, or the Musk administration, as we should call it.

Jim Thomas:

And I don't think it's going to be in the capitals that you're going to get a pushback against AI. I do think it's going to be in communities. I think it's going to be in communities who are threatened by data centers. It's going to be in communities who find that their essential services are being destroyed by AI algorithms and that their economies are being destroyed by AI-driven commerce and their jobs are being taken away by AI. It's being communities, particularly in the south or in places like Palestine, who are being bombed by AI. There are many reasons why movements are going to increasingly come together and say this is wrong. This is not what we want.

Steve Taylor:

It's a kind of colonial occupying force, and I think there's a big fight coming on this and it's not going to be governments who turn it around, it's going to be people and, of course, those who stand up and say maybe we ought to think about this AI when it comes to employment, when it comes to the environment and all these social, political and economic reasons, are going to be called Luddites. You know it, you know it right, so maybe—.

Jim Thomas:

And when we go back to the original Luddites, maybe they are. They're people who are asking is this a technology for the common good?

Steve Taylor:

And if it's not a technology for the common good, then let's move it out the way. If it's not a technology for the common good, I don't know. We're probably close to the same age and I was reading your bio and you go back into the 90s. I go back into the 90s. I started, you know, opposing below-cost timber sales in the United States and organizing protests and blockades and things like that.

Steve Taylor:

You probably did or know of similar things, but I remember back in the 90s it's sort of like well, you know, there's this global warming. It's if we don't do something, but it just feels like now that it's here and at our doorstep and consequences are becoming more apparent, we're just moving to these, these carbon trading, and now our solution will be to build these large artificial intelligence machines, data centers, cloud, whatever. I don't want to sound too old and out of it by using the term machine, but that's what we're doing. We're building these AI complexes that are just degrading the environment more and saying our solution may be in creating a lot of this generative biology. It just seems like a move in the wrong direction.

Jim Thomas:

I think what I point to is that the silver lining of all this is that many of our movements are already beginning to prepare to fight and some are even winning.

Jim Thomas:

You may have seen last year that the movie screenwriters and the movie actors and so forth all had a big strike and it was because of AI. It was AI was going to put them out of a job and they won. They put all sorts of things in their contract that AI couldn't be used in acting and writing screenplays and so forth. That's an example of fighting back against AI in a very niche industry, although it happens to be one that many of us see, and those sort of fights can happen, particularly across different parts of labor. They're going to have to happen because this is going to affect the environment and climate change. It's going to happen in communities. It's going to happen in agriculture, where AI is increasingly driving automation of agriculture and pushing farm workers off the land. We can see these as separate fights or we can bring them together and say this is not acceptable. We know, as you were saying earlier on, we know how to live in ways that are just and ecological and in community, and AI probably isn't a part of that picture.

Steve Taylor:

So, jim, I did want to you know this whole thing. With the techno bros or the, whatever these billionaires, you got Musk who wants to go to Mars. This is such an old fantasy. Have you ever looked into that? I mean, it just seems so unlikely that we're going to be able to live on Mars when we're facing, you know, the real possibility that we won't be able to live on Earth. And there's even an international scientific body who says that you know, there's too much radiation because of a lack of a magnetic field around Mars. We have the Van Allen belts here. There's no liquid core in Mars. You're just going to be irradiated. It just seems like a childhood fantasy.

Jim Thomas:

Thoughts on that, yeah, I mean let's look at what Musk is really doing. He's putting up satellites the Starlink satellites around the planet, which are then allowing him to control communications, including communications in war and battles. So that's a very smart move if you want to gain sort of strategic power. He's making deals with NASA and others to take his rockets up into space and so beginning to try and sort of put himself ahead on a commercial space race. The thing that these tech bros or technology companies always do is they'll give some kind of aspirational dream we're going to have sustainable food, we're going to have net zero, we're going to go to Mars or whatever it is, and all of that is always a sheen in order to move forward. What they really want to do, which is to build new ways to make money, want to do, which is to build new ways to make money. So I don't think anyone really wants to go to Mars, but they do want to build an industry that they can use for military purposes, industrial purposes and so forth. So that's the near-term money that's being made behind these dreams. I think there's a deeper thing as well, though. I mean these fantasies of leaving the Earth and going to outer space. For example, jeff Bezos very strongly believes this and it's the reason why Blue Origin, his space company, it's complete focus. Actually, he wants to build the highway to space. That's the thing that Bezos is interested in.

Jim Thomas:

But you know, it's also what allows these sort of sci-fi-like tech bros to legitimate things that ultimately destroy the Earth.

Jim Thomas:

You know because, as they can imagine that the future lies somewhere else, jeff Bezos actually is someone who concerns me much more in that case.

Jim Thomas:

You know, jeff Bezos controls the Bezos Earth Fund, which has now become a major philanthropic player, is putting tens of billions of sorry, yeah, tens of billions of dollars into biodiversity and climate, and yet has this fundamental belief that he's going to move all of humanity off of the planet into orbiting space stations.

Jim Thomas:

He then says you know, earth then becomes something like Yellowstone Park, a kind of protected area with a few indigenous people left in it. And that's the view of not just Jeff Bezos but the Bezos Earth Fund and a kind of increasingly fortress conservation movement that thinks, if the technology can just move humans off the planet, then we can treat the planet as a kind of tourism destination. So there is a sense in which, whether or not they manage it, these kind of stories then manifest in really perverse approaches to how we deal with our planetary problems, whereas I think, as ecological movements we're saying no, we don't want to go to space, we want to come to Earth, we want to come back to Earth, we want to be of Earth, and that's what we connect to, not to technologies that put us behind screens or out in space. So I think it's a useful thing to push back against.

Steve Taylor:

It is. We've spent billions of years co-evolving and now we want to just ignore the wisdom of that co-evolution and just use AI to create an abundance of genetically engineered organisms to release into the wild, while we have dreams of living off Earth, terraforming a planet, ignoring how inhospitable that planet is and never talking about mitigating the radiation from the sun that's hitting the surface of that planet. Then you know, all this is, you know, encouched, ensconced in this Star Wars, star Trek fantasy, that there's all this life out there, and maybe there is. But space is a big, big place. Space is vast, inhospitable, lonely Even.

Steve Taylor:

I think William Shatner took a ride on a Blue Horizon craft and he reported back that when he looked out there at the depths of space he just thought of death and his own mortality. But we do need to. You know, I don't want to be too much of a downer, but it is just amazing to me how we have this mythology of that we're going to expand into the galaxies and all of this. You know, one planet at a time, let's say. I mean, we can't even handle this one.

Jim Thomas:

Yeah, I mean you mentioned you were involved in resistance in the 90s behind the banner of Earth First. And that's where we need to start. Start with this planet.

Steve Taylor:

Well, maybe we ought to leave it there. Jim Thomas, thank you so much for joining us on Breaking Green.

Jim Thomas:

Thanks, steve, that was fun.

Steve Taylor:

You have been listening to Breaking Green a Global Justice Ecology Project podcast. To learn more about Global Justice Ecology Project, visit globaljust ecology dot org. Breaking green is made possible by tax-deductible donations by people like you. These help us lift up the voices of those working to protect forests, defend human rights and expose false solutions. Simply text give G I V E to one, seven, one, six, two, g-i-v-e to 1-716-257-4187. That's 1-716-257-4187.