Alarm bell: mid-21st century: Ramesh Shrestha

He who fails to plan is planning to fail – Winston Churchill

Since its first publication in 1972, authors of an epic publication ‘Limits to Growth’ is being updated every five years in collaboration with specialists with backgrounds in geology, ecology, agriculture, physics, economics, geography, environmental science, etc. The essence of the findings of this study was that the world could see ecological and economic collapse risking the collapse of human civilisation by the mid 21st century. The findings of this study have been presented in various international forums regularly including in the European Parliament yet, the actions by the politicians, policy makers and business conglomerates remained sluggish at best. Even the actions taken in controlling global warming started late and remained inadequate despite being warned since early 1960s. Still, this publication the authors received scathing comments by many accusing them as ‘prophesies of doom’ and wanting to install ‘world dictatorship’ and wanting to ‘impose communism worldwide’.

No one disputes that economic growth is important but is it more important than survival of humanity? If humanity is to perish, what good is economic growth? As a matter of fact, it is the quest for relentless economic growth that is leading to ecological and economic collapse. Why is the scientific community been ignored so blatantly? Is the business community dictating the government policies to ignore these warnings? Simply looking at the positive aspects of discoveries and innovations is not enough. It is imperative to analyse the negative aspects of new technology and address as required to mitigate its negative impacts. There are many contributing factors that are taking humanity to the brink of collapse. Two crucial ones are briefed below.

Industrial technology

Technology of all sorts has contributed to improving human’s living standards. Technology has made industries and our work processes efficient. Technology applied in extractive industries have become very efficient in excavating and processing minerals, oil and gas and manufacturing and so on for everyone to enjoy.

The negative aspect of this efficiency is that natural resources are depleting fast including natural forests with the spread of industrial agriculture and expansion of human settlements. There is a fear that much of these natural resources will dry up leaving nothing for the future generations. Take for example, fishing. The use of sonar technology in fishing has made fishing into a big exploitative industry. According to the World Wildlife Fund 64 species of freshwater fish have been already extinct due to overfishing. Sonar technology used by big fishing industries could destroy the livelihood of 60 million of fishermen worldwide. It is a matter of time that thousands of other fish species will go extinct in the coming decades.

Industries require extensive use of a variety of metals and minerals. Besides the heavy industries many appliances have become a kind of our appendage such as cellphones, mobile devices and televisions. Solar cells, wind turbines, geothermal plants and storage batteries are produced to generate and store energy. The metals and minerals such as copper, gold, nickel, platinum, lithium, dysprosium, neodymium and lanthanum are some of most common metals and minerals used in above devices and industries. Based on known reserves dysprosium, neodymium and lanthanum mines may become dry in the next twenty years unless new deposits are discovered. Similarly, it is estimated that excavating gold mines may be unsustainable by 2050 as the energy required to excavate gold might become unaffordable for the miners to go deeper. It is true for many other metals and minerals reserves as well.

Another related issue is the industrial waste produced during processing which are not treated well or not treated at all before releasing to water ways through drainage. Two key issues here that harms the next generation is depletion of natural resources and pollution of the environment caused during production and processing. In the long run, only those countries may perhaps survive which are able to ration the resources required for growth with a long-term perspective. Whichever way data is analysed and presented ecological collapse is a distinct possibility due to over extraction and pollution.

Social media

The spread of social media helped us connect with each other. Our communications have become real time anywhere in the world because of technology. People have found long lost relatives and childhood friends. People have found love online. It helped kill loneliness for many. It helped make shopping easy through online shopping. Online businesses helped reduce cost of rental and storage for businesses which may have reduced the cost to the customers.

People have survived happily before the spread of social media. The Internet began to spread in the 1990s. With the internet as medium, social media spread like a wildfire. Facebook was launched in 2004; Reddit launched in 2005, Twitter launched in 2006, Instagram launched in 2010, Pinterest launched in 2011, TikTok launched in 2016, etc. Now it looks as if these social media have become the birthright of people. Social media has colonised the hearts and minds of people within the last few years. These media have been used and misused by marketeers and politicians alike. The addition of artificial intelligence in social media has done wonders in solving problems and producing visuals, audio and text messages. Social media has caused the demise of privacy. It has caused the loss of cultural identity. AI has also been misapplied by miscreants in exploiting people.

There are frauds reported regularly globally. In 2021 $2.7 billion was lost to internet frauds in the USA. Canadians lost $16 billion between 2014-2019 to internet frauds. In 2023 a sum of $1.02 trillion was lost globally to internet fraud (The Strait Times, 13 Sept, 2023). This was before the application of AI in media technology. AI will eventually kill many jobs. There is a real danger that AI technology applied in social media could lead to societal collapse. Besides frauds and hacking, misinformation and disinformation promoted by the people and even the governments have reached epidemic proportions.

The misinformation in health is very serious. According to the WHO the misinformation on health issues ranges from 0.2% to 28.8% of messages in Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Given the penetration of social media such level of misinformation will certainly have serious negative consequences (WHO bulletin, 30 June 2022). WHO has also published an article on the negative impact of social media on the mental health of people resulting from depression and anxiety (WHO bulletin, 1 Sept 2022).

In recent weeks there have been discussions on regulating artificial intelligence. Given the fact that none of the governments have been able to regulate any social media thus far without a complete ban, regulating AI is going to be an impossible task. Among many contributing factors social media will lead us to societal collapse.

We still have no plan!

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