"Last year, natural disasters cost the world $320 billion. This year, four American tech companies will spend roughly the same amount building AI systems. This symmetry reveals something unsettling about how we process risk amid complex uncertainty. As we enter an era of irreversible climate change and pervasive artificial intelligence, it turns out that our cognitive responses are not apt to deal with them, and may be accelerating the risk that both dynamics will harm us and the planet we depend on."
"We stand at the intersection of two irreversible tipping points. Climate systems are approaching cascading failure points where small temperature increases trigger permanent planetary changes. Simultaneously, AI development is reaching capabilities that fundamentally alter human decision-making processes. Neither crisis is manageable alone; together, they create what psychologists recognize as a compound stressor that overwhelms normal cognitive processing. Recent, vivid experiences disproportionately shape our sense of what's probable."
"Tech executives experience AI progress viscerally - watching systems solve problems, generate content, make predictions. Climate changes unfold as statistical abstractions. A 3.5°F temperature increase sounds manageable. The economic damage from 58-billion-dollar disasters gets dispersed across insurance systems. This availability bias creates systematic misjudgment. We overinvest in vivid, immediate opportunities while underestimating abstract, statistical risks, even when both operate on the same scale and timeline."
Natural disasters and AI investment currently operate on comparable financial scales, creating a symmetry that exposes flawed human risk processing. Two concurrent, irreversible tipping points—climate cascade failures and rapidly advancing AI—interact as a compound stressor that can exceed cognitive capacity. Vivid, immediate AI progress skews perceptions of probability, while climate shifts remain abstract and dispersed across systems, producing availability bias. That bias leads to overinvestment in salient technological opportunities and underinvestment in statistical environmental risks. A related dynamic, agency decay, describes a predictable erosion of human decision-making as dependence on automated systems grows from experimentation to full reliance.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]