Ahab and the Moderns

An opinion piece in today's Times argues that to remain competitive, America must modernize its infrastructure. Not a new idea. The authors are particularly worried about the grid, saying : "Unless we expand energy generation and build out transmission aggressively, the lights will start to flicker on our future prosperity." Ah yes, training these brilliant chatbots takes lots of juice, but we have to be modern, steady march of progress and all that. The trajectory is not to be questioned. Our prosperous future depends on technological advancement and more complexity, an accelerated pace. But, according to the authors, America has lost its "momentum": "All this is happening while our rivals are building fast. China will spend $138 billion on A.I., robotics and smart infrastructure as part of its “Made in China 2025” plan. Europe is modernizing its ports, roads and digital networks to stay competitive." Somebody is going to have to break the bad news that the planet cannot provide this modern dreamscape. No matter how much investment they are prepared to make to build this energy-intensive future, we have run up against biophysical boundaries, ecological limits, that make all these plans impossible. Like Ahab, they can rage all they want against nature. It won't change the reality of those limits. This is what the late Bruno Latour was trying to describe with his airplane metaphor: There is no modern future upon which to land - but neither can we return to the old airport from which we took off. In very short order we have to create a new land on which we can land, one that repects the limits of planetary boundaries.