My guest this episode is Stephanie Wakefield. Stephanie is an assistant professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Design at Florida Atlantic University. She is also the author of a wonderful recent article in Palladium magazine titled “Frontier Panic,” which examines how the apocalyptic thinking surrounding the climate change movement has now been transferred to artificial intelligence.
Today’s conversation will discuss this article as well as some of her other scholarship, diving into how an excessive focus on resilience could hold us back from building a world shaped by innovation and adaptation to a changing environment.
In this episode
* From climate panic to AI panic (0:53)
* Who gets to govern AI? (6:15)
* Discovery, experimentation, and the frontier (11:06)
* Why we fear change (20:28)
* Climate adaptation as experiment (23:02)
* Aesthetics, infrastructure, and the future (26:17)
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)
But here are some edited highlights from the chat:
On parallels between AI and climate change…
It’s as if you took climate change documentaries and transposed them onto AI. It’s very much the same script and lens. You see people saying our children might not make it to high school because of AI, that we’re all going to die.
And, like with climate change, this discourse of apocalyptic projections based on models and media is tied to what are then said to be the appropriate responses. So it’s a discourse that authorizes a particular set of voices to make a claim to governing this new phenomenon, this new technology, and this new environment that we’re in.
With climate change, that led to this concept of resilience, which we could talk about more. And now it’s underwriting the idea of pacing the frontier or the AI pause—slowing or even forbidding the development of frontier models.
On who gets to govern AI…
In these moments, it is often the case that some figures step in to be the moral authority and position themselves as the ones with the right answer, to guide the mass of the population.
And I personally find that to be a really cynical operation because a lot of these discourses are deployed in the name of humanity and the good of humanity, or even ordinary Americans concerned about data centers or something. And I think they actually play on the fears of these people—that they’re using them as a tool in this broader play for power, rather than actually being concerned with them.
On fear surrounding AI…
I think there are certain factions within society that are obsessed with that (what can go wrong) and forwarding that way of thinking and trying to spread it. It’s a contagion, it’s a virus, like other ones that we have experienced. It spreads through mimetic contagion, through repetition, through feedback loops.
We are in a cybernetic society, and if you are trying to influence the culture and the discourse and the mood, you understand that. And you are an operator of feedback, trying to push the swarm, let’s say, in a particular direction and not others.
But I would say I don’t think that’s just us in general. These moments of technological inflection—the same was the case in the early 20th century—always involve multiple factions and perspectives. Every time we’re in this space of upheaval, it’s actually like a war, really, a war situation or a game situation. It’s a contest for putting forward other visions and other attitudes.
On the AI frontier…
The famous Turner essay on it—it’s kind of cliché to bring it up, but actually reading it again is amazing. What he’s describing is a specific experience in a material world, in a real reality, of certain people that was complex, it was fraught, it involved conflict, yes, but also experimentation—an experience that ultimately reshaped those people who had it, who forged out into the unknown.
The frontier spirit is one of an individual who is excited by going into the unknown, wants to explore it, find out what is possible there, test reality there, test the new environmental conditions, but also is willing to be reshaped by it. I think that’s a thing that is lost.
On resistance to change…
Politically, we’ve gone through the past few decades with an extreme discomfort with political categories and binaries and frames. We’ve just been in this endless series of cascading transformation.
And so I think that there is, among some types of people, a desire—a conservative desire—to stop time, stop this movement, hold on to something familiar, to build a wall ultimately against all this change rushing at us, or that we’re rushing toward, however you want to think about it.
On climate adaptation…
If it really is true that we are going through such a time of massive transformation, including environmental transformation, then wouldn’t that be an occasion to try really audacious, totally new kinds of visions and designs and experiments?
Shouldn’t this be a time for a civilization in experiment mode rather than a conservative mode? The seawall kind of becomes a metaphor, like building a wall against that change.
On 21st-century aesthetics…
Infrastructure and the aesthetics of our environment are actually one of the ways in which we create meaning in our lives and create a sense of where we’re going as a society. And I think that’s a massive project that we could and should be embarking on again.
There are a lot of calls for a return to classical architecture, which are fine, but I think this can also be combined with a thrust toward the future. What are the new styles, the new aesthetics? What is the new built environment that we want to make that’s adequate to our time and our momentum at this point in history, the 21st century?
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