We attended the recent Kenneth Myer lecture, hosted by the National Library of Australia and the Myer Foundation. Previous lecturers have included Gough Whitlam, Tim Flannery and Prof Megan Davis. This year’s lecturer was Prof Brett Sutton, now of the CSIRO and previously Victoria’s Chief Health Officer guiding us through Victoria’s responses to the COVID epidemic.
These are my rough notes for the lecture, I have taken a few liberties here with his wording but trust that I have stayed true to his message.
Three guys on top of their respective games: Brett Sutton, with Jerome Weimar and Dan Andrews, striding to the daily Press Conference with that day’s COVID figures.
The Doomsday clock is now set at 89 seconds to midnight. We are in deep trouble through the existential crises that we face. Here are the Four horsemen of our apocalypse.
1 Climate change
The world is on track for an increase of 3.1 degrees. This will lead us to a world we won’t recognise
2 Loss of biodiversity
The Anthropocene is prompting another Great Extinction. We are playing fast and loose with the natural world, taking out many nodes in the food web.
3 Unsustainable use of resources
Human made materials exceed the mass of all biodiversity. We base unlimited consumption on the capacities of a finite word. A completely circular economy is our only answer.
4 Rise of AI
Deep fakes are confounding the very notion of what is real. Social media amplify the fakes to reduce our chances of collaborative resolution of these horsemen. 6% of all energy use globally is for AI, with new fossil fuel and nuclear energy generation being installed specifically for AI. The Silicon Valley tech bros now talk of P5 or P20, being the number of years left for the survival of humans until autonomous AI machines decide that our species is the problem.
Our species is largely benign, collaborative and caring. This is largely, the case but not always, for we have some leaders with attributes as follows:
Narcissism (think Trump)
Psychopathy (think Putin)
Machiavellian (think Xi Jinping)
They are jeopardising our civilization. Check this article from The Guardian for a chilling discussion of the outlook we face.
Brett Sutton argues that hiding under the doona is not the answer. He says we should:
Go local – do what you can in your community, build coalitions, gather the like-minded around you, for going global means the weakest link sets the course.
Go democratic – use our system, become politically-active, involve as many as possible to effect change in policy and process.
Go all in – we can’t deal with the problems by tinkering at the edges. Protest, march, challenge!
We walked away from the lecture hall with a sense of fore-boding, tempered with gratitude, for we have public intellectuals who are communicating frankly and fearlessly to help us maintain agency in what are clearly huge challenges.