Colleagues have been asking me how I see and think about the intensification of AI concerns, and the growing sense that we are now in a period of crisis.
In light of recent revelations — that folks in the relevant industries believe they are triggering existential risks to humanity, releasing products that can cause enormous harm to many millions of people in their normal use, and wargaming out how, as companies, how to survive with maximum value intact in the event of an AI disaster — how does a working futurist make sense of the world we live in now?
Here’s one hypothesis: The AI crisis is similar in nature to the climate crisis.
Both crises — climate and AI — are so dangerous because they are so unprecedented. They both involve hidden rapid escalations of risk, political attempts to deny (and stall action to mitigate) those risks, and sudden recognition of deepening discontinuities. It might be going too far to call AI digital coal, but the parallels are strong.
Where the parallel breaks is that at least some people working in and around AI seem to have commercial interests, even identity needs, that lead them to expound on worst-case AI future scenarios as an effort to magnify the value of their expertise or ownership. There the parallel breaks down: imagine Exxon in 1972 boasting that its oil was gonna melt the f**k out of the ice caps, and oil men were the masters of human destiny.
But, to the extent that the AI-as-climate-chaos analogy holds, climate foresight and strategies offer some of the best windows into thinking about what this unasked-for exponential infiltration of machine intelligence into our lives might mean.
And how we ruggedize for the fallout.
This show is loosely part of my podcast series on thinking about personal strategies for meeting the climate crisis. (Missed the first show in the series? You can listen here.)
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PS: You can learn how to plan more sensibly and successfully for your family’s life in planetary discontinuity. The New York Times recently featured my Personal Climate Strategy Workshop. You can learn more about my other offerings at my climate courses site. The next Workshop will be offered in November 2026. You can also read a previous participant’s account of what it’s like to take the course in Alex Steffen’s Personal Climate Strategy Workshop: A Review.
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