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Month: January 2022

Social Unrest, AI Chefs and Keeping Big Tech in line

This year we are starting something new. Some of you may be aware that we keep a repository for articles that are relevant to the topics we discuss in the portal such as AI ethics, AI for good, culture & entertainment, and imagination (theology). We would like to take a step further and publish a monthly re-cap of the most important news on these areas. We are constantly tracking developments in these areas and would like to curate a summary for your edification. This is our first one so I ask you to be patient with us as we figure out formatting.

Can you believe it?

Harvesting data from prayers: Data is everywhere and companies are finding more and more uses for it. As the practice of data harvesting becomes commonplace, nothing is sacred anymore. Not even religion is safe, as pray.com now is collecting and sometimes sharing with other companies like Meta. As the market of religious heats up, investors are flocking to back new ventures. This probably means a future of answered prayers, not by God but by Amazon.

Read more here: BuzzFeed.

Predicting another Jan 6th: What if we could predict and effectively address social unrest before it becomes destructive? This is the promise of new algorithms that helps predict the next social unrest event. Coupcast, developed by the University of Central Florida uses AI and machine learning to predict civil unrest and electoral violence. Regardless of its accuracy, using ML in this arena raises many ethical questions. Is predicting social unrest a cover for suppressing it? Who gets to decide whether social unrest is legitimate or not? Hence we are left with many more questions but little guidance at this moment.

Read more here: WashingtonPost

IRS is looking for your selfies: IRS using facial recognition to identify taxpayers: opportunity or invitation to disaster? You tell me. Either way, the government quietly launched the initiative requiring individuals to sign up with the facial recognition company if they want to check the status of their filling. Needless to say, this move was not well received by civil liberty advocates. In the past, we dove into the ethical challenges of this growing AI practice.

To read more click here: CBS news

Meta’s announces a new AI quantum computer: Company will launch a powerful new quantum AI computer in Q1. This is another sign Meta refuses to listen to its critiques only marching on to its own techno-optimistic vision of the future – one in which it makes Billions of dollars, of course. What is not clear is how this new computer will enhance the company’s ability to create worlds in the metaverse. Game changer or window-dressing? Only time will tell

To read more click here: Venture Beat

AI Outside the Valley

While our attention is on the next move coming from Silicon Valley, a lot is happening in AI and other emerging technologies throughout the world. I would propose, that is actually where the future of these technologies lie. Here is a short selection of related updates from the globe.

Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash

Digital Surveillance in South Asia: As activists and dissidents move their activity online, so does their repression. In this interesting article, Antonia Timmerman outlines 5 main ways authoritarian regimes are using cyber tools to suppress dissent.

To read more click here: Rest of the World

Using AI for health, you better be in a rich country: As we have discussed in previous blogs, AI algorithms are only as good as the data we feed them. Take eye illness, because most available images are coming from Europe, US, and China, researchers worry they will not be able to detect problems in under-represented groups. This example highlights that a true democratization of AI must include first an expansion of data sources.

To read more click here: Wired

US companies fighting for Latin American talent: Not all is bad news for the developing world. As the search for tech talent in the developed centers is returning empty, many are turning to overlooked areas. Latin American developers are currently on high demand, driving wages up but also creating problems for local companies who are unable to compete with foreign recruiters.

To read more click here: Rest of the World

Global Race for AI Regulation Marches On

unsplash

The window for new regulation in the US congress may be ending as mid-term elections approach. This will ensure the country will remain lagging behind global efforts to rein in Big Tech’s growing market power and mounting abuses.

As governments fail to take action or do it slowly, some are thinking about a different route. Could self-regulation be the answer? With that in mind, leading tech companies are joining forces to come up with rules for the metaverse as the technology unfolds. Will that be enough?

Certainly not for the Chinese government if you ask. The Asian super-power released the first global efforts to regulate deepfakes. With this unprecedented move, China leads the way being the first government to address this growing concern. Could this be a blueprint for other countries?

Finally, the EU fines for violations of GDPR hit a staggering 1.2 Billion. Amazon alone was slapped with an $850 Million penalty for its poor handling of customer data. While this is welcome news, one cannot assume it will lead to a change in behavior. Given mounting profit margins, Big Tech may see these fines not as a deterrent but simply as a cost of doing business in Europe. We certainly hope not but would be naive not to consider this possibility.

Cool Stuff

NASA’s latest and largest-ever Telescope reached its final destination. James Webb is now ready to start collecting data. Astrophysicists and space geeks (like myself) are excited about the possibilities of seeing well into the cosmic past. The potential for new discoveries and new knowledge is endless.

To read more click here: Nature

Chef AI, coming to a kitchen near you. In an interesting application, chefs are using AI to tinker and improve on their recipes. The results have been delicious. Driven in part by a trend away from animal protein, Chefs need to get more creative and AI is here to help.

To read more click here: BBC

That’s it. This is our update for January. Many blessings and see you next month!

Kora, our new addition to the family says hi and thank you for reading.

Painting a Global View of AI for Good: Part 2

This blog continues the summary for our AITAB meeting in November. Given the diverse group of voices, we were able to cover a lot of ground in the area of AI for good. In the first part I introduced the 3 main trends of AI for good: democratization of AI skills, green AI, and AI justice. In this blog, we cover examples of AI for good in the industry, academia, and a global perspective from Eastern Europe. Our board members spoke from experience and also listed some great resources to anyone interested in getting deeper into the field.

AI for Good in the Industry

Davi: Another way AI and machine learning are helping in sustainability, is by improving companies’ consumption of non-renewables. For example, one of the largest expenses of a cruise line company is fuel consumption. Mega ships require untold amounts of fuel to move them across oceans around the globe. And, in maritime, the exact same route may require differing amounts of fuel due to the many variables that impact fuel consumption such as the weight of the ship, seasonal and unexpected currents, and different weather patterns.

AI and machine learning have expanded the capacity to calculate, with never-seen-before precision, the amounts of fuel needed for such mega-ships to safely complete each of their routes in real-time. This newfound capability is not only good for these companies’ bottom lines but also helps them preserve the environment by diminishing emissions.

Elias: That’s a great point. A recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that AI applications in transportation can reduce greenhouse emissions by as much as 1.5% globally so this is definitely an important trend to track.

Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash

A Report from Eastern Europe   

Frantisek : I tried to investigate and revise my knowledge in the three areas Elias proposed. Regarding the first topic, democratization of AI skills, I think from the perspective of Prague and the Czech Republic, we are at the crossroads between Eastern and Western Europe. There are initiatives that focus on AI education and popularization and issues related to that. I would like to point out a specific Prague AI initiative corporation of different academic and private companies as well.

This kind of initiative is more technological, and they are just beginning to grasp the idea that they need some ethical additions like philosophers. Yet, they are not inviting theologians to the table. I guess we need to prove our value before we will be “invited to the club”.

With that said, Prague AI wants to transform the city into a European center for AI. They have good resources for that, both human and institutional support. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if they achieve this goal, and I wish them all the best. My research group aims at connecting with them too. But we need first to establish ourselves a bit better within the context of our university.

On another front, we established contact recently with a Ukrainian Catholic University which aims at opening an interdisciplinary program for technology and theology. However, we do not know yet, how far they are with this plan. We intend to learn more since I am in process of scheduling an in-person meeting with the dean of their Theological Faculty. It was not yet possible due to the pandemic. We are very much interested in this cooperation.

We also aspire to establish a conversation with the Dicastery for Integral Human Development and other Vatican-related organizations in Rome where issues of new technologies and AI receive great attention especially in relation to ethics and Catholic Social Teaching. In December 2021 one of my team members went to Rome to start conversations leading towards that aim.

Photo by Guillaume Périgois on Unsplash

In summary, here in Central and Eastern Europe democratization of AI is more focused on education and popularization. People are getting acquainted with the issue.

Regarding sustainable AI, we are following the footprints of the European Commission. One of the European commissioners that formed this agenda is from the Czech Republic. And maybe because of that, the European Commission sponsored a big conference in September which was in large part focused on green AI. The contribution about the role of AI in processing plastic materials was especially interesting because it has a great potential for green AI implementation.

The European Commission introduced a plan for the third decade of this century. It’s called the Digital Decade. It includes objectives like digitalization of public buildings, digital economics, and the growth of digital literacy among citizens with large support for the field of AI.

In Europe, AI justice is a big issue. There is hope and a lot of potential in AI to contribute towards the effectiveness and quality of judicial procedures. Yet there is an equivalent concern about the fundamental rights of individuals. I’m not very well acquainted with these issues, but it is an important topic here in Europe.

AI for Good In Academia

AI for good
Photo by Vadim Sherbakov on Unsplash

Scott: I’m a professor of physics at Belmont University. I started working with machine learning around 2013 /2014 with respect to developing audio signal processing applications. I managed to get into an AI Ethics grant in 2017 and went to Oxford for a couple of summers.

My background a long time ago was astrophysics, but recently, I eventually became focused on machine learning. I split my time between doing technical work and also doing philosophical and ethical thinking. I recently taught a general education undergraduate class that integrated machine learning and ethics. We talked about how machine learning and algorithms work while also discussing various ethical principles and players in the field.

Then the university requested I teach a more advanced course more focused on coding for upper-level students. This fall I’m teaching AI deep learning and ethics, and it’s kicking my butt because I am writing a lot of the lessons from scratch. One of the things I’m doing in this course is integrating a lot with things from the open-source community and the public free machine learning and deep learning education. There’s Google, Facebook, and then there’s everybody else. 

So I’ve taken a lot of classes online. I’m pretty involved with the Fast AI community of developers, and through their ancillary groups like Hugging Face ,for example. It’s a startup but also a community. This makes me think in terms of democratization, in addition to proliferation around the world, there’s also a proliferation with everybody that’s not at one of these big tech firms as far as disseminating education.

Democratization of AI and Open Source

I think a couple of big things that come to mind are open source communities that are doing their own work like Luther AI. They released their own GPT model that they trained. It’s a sort of grassroots community group that is loosely affiliated but managed to pull this off through people donating their time and expertise. 

Photo by Shahadat Rahman on Unsplash

One of the things they teach in Fast AI is a lot about transfer learning. Instead of training a giant model from scratch, we’re taking an existing model and fine-tuning it. That relates to sustainability as well. There are ecological concerns about the power consumption needed to train language models. An example would be Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation (MT-NLP) from Microsoft, a gigantic language model. 

With transfer learning, we can start with an initialization of a model that doesn’t require much power. This allows people all over the globe to run them with little computational resources. The idea is to take Ivory Tower’s deep learning research and apply it to other things. Of course one of the questions people think about is what are we inheriting when we grab a big model and then fine-tune it. Yet, nobody really knows how much of that late structure stays intact after the fine-tuning.

It’s an interesting and accessible area. Considering how many people, myself included, post free content online for education. You can take free courses, free blog posts for learning about machine learning, developing tools and ethics as well. The open-source movement is a nice microcosm of democratization of content that relates both AI ethics and sustainable AI. 

Photo by niko photos on Unsplash

Elias: Thank you, Scott. I want to seize on that to make a point. Open source in the tech world is a great example of the mustard seed technology idea. It starts through grassroots efforts where many donate their time to create amazing things. That is the part I think technology culture is teaching theology to us by actualizing the gift economy. In the real world we live in we pay for companies and they focus on profit. It is highly transactional and calculating. Here you have an alternative economy where an army of volunteers are creating things for free and inviting anyone to take it as needed. They build it simply for the pleasure of building it. It’s a great example. 

Scott: I’m also starting to do some work on algorithmic auditing, and I just found this kid from a group called data science for social good. Other people may find it interesting as I do.

What Will Online Religion Look Like In The Metaverse?

The Internet is not to be understood merely as a tool. It is a specific extension of a complex environment instead. Contemporaries live on (or in) the Internet as well as in the physical landscapes of this world. Besides, such a mode of living in the world continues to intensify. Always more human activities are being moved into the online environment which changes them a lot. Just think of how rapidly the activity of shopping has changed during, let’s say, the last decade. Three decades ago, shopping was a completely different experience than it is nowadays, as the Internet became an everyday reality.

Regardless of these considerations, it would be a mistake to see the Internet only as a kind of parallel reality. As a complex phenomenon, the Internet touches all spheres of human life, including the sphere of religion – the religious life. At this place, a crucial question might be asked: What is the relation between religion and the key technical medium of the internet?

In general, we may consider 3 dimensions of such a relationship. It is (1) religion online, (2) online religion, and (3) online religious experience. The first two dimensions were studied and well defined by Canadian sociologist and anthropologist of religion, Christopher Helland. The third was added a few years ago by new media and media theory experts from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Menahem Blondheim, and Hananel Rosenberg. The concept they suggested raises serious questions, but at the same time, it touches on the limits of what is presently possible. In any case, all phases (if we look at the problem from the perspective of development as Christopher Helland), or dimensions (if we consider the fact that the first two categories often exist in parallel or in different combinations) might be described as follows.

taken from Pixabay.com

The Initial Stages of Internet Religion

Religion online describes a static presence of religion on the internet. Typically, good examples of this are the websites containing information about different religious communities and their activities. In the Christian religious tradition, we can point out websites of parishes or church communities. According to Helland, this relationship between religion and the internet belongs to the past, which was characteristic of slow internet connection and technically undeveloped, static, access devices (e.g., heavy personal computers), which some of us may remember from the 1990s. At that time, the internet was understood by religious communities merely as a tool for their presentations. With time, websites, as well as social networks with religious content, became an integral part of life for a great number of religious communities. They will likely continue to serve, as such, even in times when the internet offers new possibilities.

In online religion, the Internet has become a tool for developing religious practice online with the improvement of the connection speed and improved access technologies. Online prayer groups, religious rituals, or services set and performed in an online environment might be mentioned as examples. This form of interaction between religions and the internet encountered its unprecedented boom during the last two years in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. With governmental restrictions and lockdowns, religious life in its traditional communitarian form stopped practically overnight and religions were forced to move a large part of their activities to the online environment. The internet was naturally used as a tool to handle this change. Soon, however, it was understood that it is not only a tool but also a new environment for religious practice from now on.

This is of course not without theological problems. Perhaps, one of the crucial questions refers to the online religious experience. Is it possible to speak about online religious experience at the level of online religion? Is online religious experience real or rather “just” virtual (and thus not real)? Blondheim and Rosenberg open this question and argue for a new dimension of the relationship between religion and the internet because, in their opinion, it is possible to encounter authentic religious experiences in cyberspace.

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

The Next Frontier

It is disputable if online religious experiences are already present phenomena or if they are an uncertain matter of the future. In the latter form, they would only be considered at a level of a vision for the future. Some suggest that something like an online religious experience is principally not possible at all. However, theoretically speaking, the increasing speed of connection and response of largely personalized and omnipresent access devices (e.g., smartphones), quickly advancing the datafication of human lives, virtual reality development, and interaction with artificial intelligence, bring serious questions into the realm of religion.

The internet is becoming a true environment; something that becomes more transparent like a borderline between cyberspace and real space in which our bodies dwell. It slowly fades away. Consequently, cyberspace should neither be labeled as a “consensual hallucination” as it once was by its conceiver William Gibson, nor as a kind of utopia, or place “nowhere-somewhere” (Kevin Robins). Contemporary people live in digital landscapes as they do in physical ones. These two traditionally separated spaces manifest themselves, today, as one hybrid space.

The age of the internet of things is slowly coming to its end, and the era of the internet of everything is setting in. Quickly advancing mobile technologies are playing a key role in the hybrid space interface. Thanks to them, people are practically connected to the internet non-stop. They can create digital-physical landscapes and perceive how they become digital-physical hybrid entities as they live in hybrid (real-virtual) spaces they create for themselves. To put it bluntly, what is happening on the world wide web, is happening in the real world, and vice versa. Everything might be online, and to a large extent, it already is.

Photo by Diana Vargas on Unsplash.com

Religion in the Metaverse

Let’s assume that in such an environment (such as the metaverse) it is possible to have an authentic religious experience. In other words, let’s presume that from this perspective, the encounter with the Sacred in cyberspace has the same characteristics and qualities as in the physical landscapes of this world. An imaginary wall between real and virtual is still perceivable. However, with the emergence of the metaverse, it is becoming more transparent and more permeable. Yet, if it ever will disappear remains a question. In each case, we can already speak of religious experience in cyberspace concerning some computer games as World of Warcraft, for instance (Geraci, Gálik, Gáliková).

Recent research on Neo-Paganism suggests that a relatively high number of its adherents consider their online religious activity equivalent to that in the physical world. Some of them even stated that their religious activity in cyberspace is on a higher level than that in real life. We may also speak of online religious experiences concerning the phenomena of virtual pilgrimages (cyber-pilgrimages or e-pilgrimages). Further, platforms like the one with the meaningful name Second Life make it possible to live a religious life in a completely online environment.

Blondheim and Rosenberg believe that online religious experience in the digital world is “emerging from the breakdown and collapse of all entrenched conventions and narratives in the digital world, and the opening of a chaotic abyss can (…) serve as a prelude to a fresh new theological start.” Unfortunately, they do not say anything about how this new theological start they propose should look. But, right now, it is not that important because it may stimulate our imagination and thoughts on the transformations of faith in the digital age.

What would be your reflection on this matter?

An earlier version of this text originally appeared in the Christnet online magazine in Czech (https://www.christnet.eu/clanky/6592/nabozenstvi_on_line_on_line_nabozenstvi_a_on_line_nabozenska_zkusenost.url); published 22nd September 2021. English translation published with the permission of the Christnet magazine. Translated by the author.

František Štěch is a research fellow at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Charles University. He serves as coordinator of the “Theology & Contemporary Culture” research group. Previously he worked at the Catholic Theological Faculty of Charles University as a research fellow and project PI. His professional interests include Fundamental theology; Ecclesiology; Youth theology; Religious, and Christian identity; Intercultural

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Painting a Global View of AI for Good: Part I

In early November, AITAB (AI Theology Advisory Board) met for another fruitful conversation. As in our previous meeting, the dynamic interaction between our illustrious members took the dialogue to places I did not anticipate. In this first part, we set up the dialogue by framing the key issues in AI for good. We then move to a brief report on how this is playing out in East Asia. In a conversation often dominated by Silicon Valley perspectives, it is refreshing to take a glimpse at less-known stories of how AI technologies are reshaping our world.

Defining AI for Good

Elias: Let me say a few words to start the discussion. This is different from our other discussions where we focused on ethics. In those instances, we were reflecting on what was “wrong” with technology and AI. Today, I wanted to flip this script and focus more on the positive, what I call “AI for good”. Good theology starts with imagination. Today is going to be more of an exercise of imagination to notice what’s happening but doesn’t necessarily make the news.

More specifically, there are three main areas where I see global AI for good starting to take shape. The first is the democratization of AI skills – spreading technological knowledge to underrepresented communities. This is a very important area, since as we discussed before, people make AI in their own image. If we don’t widen the group, we will have the same type of AI. A great example is Data Science Nigeria. Just yesterday I was in one of their bootcamps as a speaker. It’s very encouraging to see young men and women from Nigeria and other African countries getting involved in data science. It started as a vision of two data scientists that want to train 10 million data scientists in Nigeria for the next 10 years. It’s a bold goal, and I sure pray they achieve it.

The other topic is about Green AI or Sustainable AI. How AI can help us become more sustainable. One example is using computer vision to identify illegal fires in the Amazon – using AI to affect change with an eye on sustainability.  And the last one is AI justice. The same way AI is creating bias, it’s using AI tools to identify and call out this bias.  That is the work of some organizations like Algorithmic Justice League led by Joy Buolamwini. That’s also an area that is growing. These three areas cover the main themes of global AI for good.

Global AI for Good
by Bruno Melo from Unsplash.com

Re-Framing Technology

Let me frame them within a biblical context. In technology when we usually mean big tech that comes from Silicon Valley. As an alternative, I want to introduce this different concept, which is mustard seed technology. In the gospels, Jesus talks of the kingdom of God being like a mustard seed. Though it’s one of the smallest seeds it becomes a big tree where birds can come and rest in their shade.

I love this idea about this grassroots technology, either being developed or being deployed to provide for others. Just think of farmers in Kenya using their phones to make payments and doing other things they haven’t been able to do before. Those are the stories I wanted to think about today. I wanted to start thinking geographically.  How does global AI for good look like in different places of the world?

Photo by Akson on Unsplash

AI for Good in East Asia

Levi : Here in East Asia, the turning point came in 2016 when DeepMind AlphaGo (Google supercomputer) beat Lee Se Dol in a game of Go. It created a very interesting push in South Korea and China to rapidly advance and develop AI infrastructures. I’m involved with a group on AI social and ethical concerns focused on Asia. The group has nine different scholars from 6 different Asian countries. One of the things we are going to discuss soon is a report from MIT from interviewing several Asian business owners about direction. This report is 2 years old, but it’s interesting to see how small focused the state of China was then. Now they are one of the world leaders in AI development.

There is a major push in this part of the world. Asia across the board was late to the industrial game, except for Japan. As many countries like South Korea, China have massively industrialized in the last decades, they see AI as a way to push into the future. This opens a lot of questions. Like the ones about democratization and justice that need to be addressed. But one of the interesting things is that Asian countries are interested in pushing towards AI regulation compared to the USA or other European countries. There is also this recognition of wanting to be the best in advanced technology but also the best in “getting it right”. 

Where that’s going to go it’s hard to say. We know for that in China, the government directs most of AI development. So the question of democratization may not be the question at hand. South Korea allocated billions of won to developing AI. around the same time. It will likely engage in more democratization than China.

It is interesting to see how justice issues, like how facial recognition fails to recognize people that aren’t white men. When you’re training this tech in Chinese data sets, you have a much larger data set – one billion and a half people rather than 350 million (in the US), which allows the possibility to get rid of these biases which offers great potential for global AI for good.

There is also the problem of natural language processing. GPT-3 recently came out, and just like GTP-2, is based on English web pages. This means there is bias from the English-speaking world that is coded in those AI systems. But if you start training those same systems on Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi language pages, you are going to end up with different frameworks. The bigger question will be, is there a way to put these in dialogue? I think this is a much more complicated question. Because there is so much development going around in this part of the world, it opens up the recognition that many of the biases encoded in western development of AI will not be the same as the rest of the world.

Conclusion

In this first part, we introduced the discussion on a global view of AI for good. It includes three main categories: democratizing AI skills, sustainable AI and AI justice. We then framed it within a mustard seed technology perspective. That is, we focus on the margins as opposed to the geo-centers of technological power. We are less interested in Silicon Valley and more on what is happening in the street corners of global cities.

Why ‘Don’t Look Up’ Falls Flat on Climate Change

A while back, I noticed “Don’t Look Up” at the top of the Netflix rankings. Considering the star-studded cast, I was excited to watch the comedy with my wife. I could not have been more disappointed. The long-winded satire missed many opportunities only accomplishing in repeating Hollywood caricature images of the last president and his supporters. With that said, this is not the first movie that I did not like. What surprised me, however, and made me open an exception to write about a movie I disliked was the passionate reaction I was getting from my lone FB comment. More importantly, what struck me was how many respondents saw it as a good metaphor for the climate change crisis.

In this blog, I would contend the exact opposite: the movie did a great disservice for raising awareness and affecting environmental change. It did so, not just because of its flat jokes but because it framed the issue wrongly, only serving to confirm the prejudices against Hollywood activism – namely, that it is shallow, misguided, and most often, ineffective. In short, ‘Don’t Look Up’ misses the point on Climate Change.

Before you tune out thinking you were trapped into reading a climate denier diatribe, let me introduce myself. I have written before here about the importance of making the environment our top priority. My commitment goes beyond writing. Our household composts nearly 80-90% of our non-animal food waste goes back to the earth. I drive a Plug-in Hybrid and solar panels will soon be placed in our rooftops.

I don’t say this to brag but only to make a point that there can be disagreement even within those who support the bold climate change action. This is not a binary world and I hope by now you can slow down and read what I have to say. I write this not because I don’t care about climate change but precisely because I do.

Trailer from Youtube

Framing the Issue Wrongly

Now that we got our introductions out of the way let me introduce the central point here. To use an analogy of a cataclysmic disaster 6 months from now to convince people about climate change misses the mark because it reduces it to a one-time event. This is hardly what is happening. Our climate crisis is not a premonition for an upcoming doomsday. Instead, it is a complex and gradual problem which ramifications we hardly understand. It does not mean it is not serious, just that real change requires long-term planning and commitment.

Don't Look Up poster

If anything, the movie exposed America’s inability to inspire grand ideas and engage in long-term plans. The problem with climate denial is not just that it ignores the facts but also that it demonstrates fatally selfish short-termism. We are simply unable to think beyond a 4-year election cycle or even the next year. Instead of working towards long-term plans we instead try to reduce the problem into one cataclysmic event through cheap comedy that only feeds into political polarization.

What about urgency? It is true that the window is closing for us to meet UN temperature increase goals. In that sense, there is a parallel with an impending disaster. With that said, while the urgency is real, addressing it is a lot more complex than shooting a meteor off-course. Hence, my concern is sounding a general alarm and labeling anyone who ignores it as an idiot is not very productive.

Top-down vs Grassroots Change

According to ‘Don’t Look Up’, while climate denial is a generalized problem, it is particularly acute among Silicon Valley and the political elite. They take a light jab at the media which is rather ironic, given who is talking. It also critiques recent billionaires’ efforts to reach space as a glorified act of escapism.

Not to say that their criticism here is unwarranted. I must admit that Meryl Streep as a Trump-like character had its funny moments. The memory of last year’s stupidity and cruel incompetence is still vivid. Almost too real to even be funny. The Tech Tycon character also had its moment, constantly looking for ways to profit from earth’s misfortunes. This is not too far from Big Tech’s mentality of technologizing their way out of any problem. That is, they are constantly seeking to fit a technological hammer to problems that require a scalpel.

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash
Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

With that said, the movie again misses the point. The change we need to address climate change must start at the grassroots and then makes its way to the top. If we continue to look at the centers of power for solutions, we will be in bad shape. Elon Musk made the electric car cool. That is progress but it is a bit disheartening that it took sleek design and neighbor envy to get people interested in this technology. An electric future powered by Tesla may be better than the one offered by other carmakers but that is still short of the change we need.

As long as American suburbs lie undisturbed with their gigantic SUVs spewing pollution in school car lines, we have a long way to go. The change needed is cultural. We need something that goes deeper than “scaring people” into doing good things. We need instead to articulate an attractive vision that will compel large segments of society to commit to sustained, long-term change.

Conclusion

You may say that I am taking this movie too seriously. Comedies are not meant to be political manifestos and will often get a pass in how they accomplish their goals. That may very well be the case. My goal here is not to change your mind in regards to the movie but instead to use this cultural phenomenon as a way to open up a wider conversation about our current predicament.

While our environmental crisis is dire, we need a bigger vision of flourishing to address it. It is not about an impending doom but a warning that we need to change our relationship with our planet. Instead of focusing on those who cannot see it yet, why not show them a vision of flourishing for the planet that they can get behind?

The work for the flourishing of all life requires a long-range view so we can engage in the hard work needed ahead of us. If all this movie does is to bring the conversation back to this issue, then that’s progress. In that sense, ‘Don’t Look Up’ may not be a complete loss on the cause to address climate change. Even if it misses the point, it hopefully makes people think.

And of course, watch out for the Broteroc!