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On AI and the usefulness of education  The following is a keynote speech delivered at Villanova College
There’s a phrase that used to get a lot of mileage back when I was in high school, and that phrase was “when am I ever going to use this?” Calculus? When am I ever going to use that, I would think to myself. Biology, I would not be using that, I was sure of it. I asked the question about Shakespeare and world religions, about geography and physics. Some people would be using that, sure. But me? No. Today, the unfortunate fact of the matter is that you could ask this question of many more things once considered more straightforwardly useful. How “useful” is it to be able to closely read and understand long or difficult texts when you can probably suck out most of the useful tidbits with a little help of AI? How useful is it to know how to program, design, or write, when billions of dollars are being marshalled by the world’s biggest companies to build tools that code for you, create images, videos, and designs for you, that write your emails, reports, birthday cards, wedding toasts, and eulogies? AI is probably going to get better at doing most of this and more. We seem to be closing in on the day when this question — “when am I ever going to use this” — could be asked of basically anything we learn. But in the years after high school it has occurred to me, in my wisdom, that this question is the wrong one. As your teachers have probably explained to you, the value of your education is less in your daily lessons than in learning how to think. So, what should we be thinking about in a world intent on building machines designed to do more and more of our thinking for us? * I graduated from this school in 2009. At that point, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. I knew I kinda liked writing, but I did not really see myself as a “writer.” I went to journalism school because I thought maybe I would get into TV or radio. It was a way to give shape to a series of vague interests. I thought it might be useful. I ended up really liking university, and I still hold onto this romanticized notion of it. Of course, there was all the fun stuff I’m sure most of you are looking forward to: the parties and the freedom and whatnot. But I also enjoyed classes. I got to pick the ones that I actually wanted to go to, listen to professors I found smart and interesting, and got to read books written by people whom I would come to regard as geniuses. There’s a kind of magic in that, in being able to follow them as they laid out how they think about the world. I fell in love with magazine writing, especially the stuff that was coming out in the early 2000s. There were these writers with unmistakable voices and inventive ways of storytelling. Some of them lived like rock stars, getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to write six stories a year about whatever they wanted for Vanity Fair, Harpers, or the New Yorker. They had ridiculously sized expense accounts, travelled to any corner of the world that interested them, and had readers waiting for them to publish basically anything — a deep expose into a slightly aged news story, or some sweeping personal essay of an otherwise ordinary experience. People are still reading them decades later. I remember when I was studying at Carleton in Ottawa, the faculty used to tell us that 20 years before our time, the most prestigious publications and outlets used to line up on convocation day to scoop up all the top graduates, offering them comfortable lifetime gigs at the Globe and Mail or the CBC. That would not be the case for us. We got a handshake and about 26 months of unpaid internships before some of us landed full-time positions in media, and many of the rest moved on to roles in public relations and marketing. After the requisite internship circuit, I became a staff writer, then an editor at a well regarded magazine for physicians until — unsettled by seeing colleagues laid off and feeling my optimism about the future of the industry fade — I moved on. I also dearly miss magazine writing and would trade those years for nothing, but I have no regrets about the career that decided to pursue in advertising. I am fortunate to work at a great agency, with great people, and we do work that I’m proud of. My education was useful. It was where I began to learn what good writing looks like, and it gave me an opportunity to discover the people and ideas that would shape my professional life; it was where I found something that I wanted to master. * AI today is most useful in what I call “the proficiency gap.” This is an almost universally held view among professionals that AI can do a bunch of these other jobs, which I don’t know how to do, but of course it can’t do my job, which I do know how to do. If you don’t know how to code but you want to build a website, you can “vibe code." If you need to put together a report but you aren’t a designer, AI tools can do that too. If you’re not the best with words, an AI-written draft of the email you're struggling with is probably going to look pretty good. But with a different set of eyes, AI-produced work doesn’t look quite as hot. I know next to nothing about coding, but I know our director of programming is a long way from being able to outsource coding tasks to non-coders using AI. Our designers are not especially happy when they are forced to work with a file a client has designed with AI, or asks them for an absurdly specific image that they can "just make with ChatGPT." Now, both the coders and designers I work with have no problem using AI to write, but I do not. That is because AI writing is the worst. This is not just because the writing itself tends to be cliched and awful in dozens of other ways, but because it is hollow. It is a pantomime of what you could say so you don’t actually have to say anything. It undermines the fundamental function of any act of communication. I don’t care if you don’t think you can write, or can’t spell, or don’t understand subject/verb agreement, or whatever. I care what it is you’re trying to say. And when you use AI to write, neither of us really know what that is. Your sincerity is also immediately in question. Am I really sorry if I hand off the task of writing it to AI? Am I really thankful if I cannot be bothered to take the time to thank you myself? How confident can I be in the contents of this email if I needed ChatGPT to co-write it with me? I know some of you are bored listening to me. I get it. But I promise you it could be worse. If I did not have enough respect for you to write this speech myself — if I had AI crib some well-worn material from other famous alumni day speeches so I wouldn’t have to think quite as hard about what I wanted to say to you — you would be able to tell. It took me a few years even after AI came around to appreciate this, so I don’t really expect you to at this point. If I had an essay-writing machine in high school, I would have been using the essay-writing machine. But the thing is, you shouldn’t. I know this is a hard sell, so let me put it this way: I am a professional writer and basically nobody cares what I have to say. I am only slightly more influential than a homeless guy shouting into a paper bag. Getting people’s attention is rare, and holding it for any period of time is rarer still, which is why I cannot explain to you what a privilege it is to have an audience. As a student, you have an audience, by default, in your teachers — people who are thoughtful, who care about you, and who are professionally trained. By the time you reach the end of school, it may be the last time you ever have an audience like that. You might as well tell them what you think. * Some people will tell you the most useful thing you can learn today is how to use AI. There is some truth to that. AI literacy is essential if only to help us understand how the ground is shifting beneath our feet. The other thing these particular people will tell you is that AI is eventually going to free all of us from menial work so we can focus on higher-order tasks. That’s the important stuff. Optimizing your schedule? Done. Research? It’s combed through the journals and periodicals for you so you can get to answers quicker, figure out what questions to ask next. Reporting? It’s synthesized the relevant information for your review before you circulate it. Strategy? Here are a handful of options based on all the available data and your past preferences. The current frontier in AI technology is what is known as agentic AI, programs that operate independently as they carry out chains of more complex tasks. I do not know if there will ever be a super-intelligent AI that replaces the sum total of human economic output so we can spend our days in a state of perfect leisure, reading poetry, tending our gardens, frolicking, etc. But I know for certain that almost all of us will be giving up more and more of these little decisions to save our precious mental bandwidth for the bigger ones. This is the promise of AI: that the really meaningful work happens on the other side of the work it is doing for you. But I don’t think that’s true. Ezra Klein, an American journalist, said in an interview recently that when he started his career, his greatest competitive advantage over his older professional peers was his willingness to do things like reading budget reports — these simple 30-page documents — that everybody else found “too boring.” Being able to do difficult things — including boring or tedious things — is far more valuable than being able to use a tool that is designed to be easy to use. The world is not exactly awash in job applicants who write things like “good at Googling” on their resume. To the extent that using AI will become a skill, it will be in your ability to parse its outputs and to lend it a point of view. But I promise you, you will not have a point of view to lend if you are so often willing to give up your opportunities to develop it. Mastery is not to be found in tools of efficiency. Of course, sooner or later, you will find yourself in situations where efficiency matters more. When you are a successful scientist who simply does not have the time to apply for 30 research grants in a day, you won’t need to listen to me about how it’s better to be doing that stuff yourself. Just be sure to invite me back when you’re giving your keynote here in a few years. * There is a long history of moral panic about new technology. The internet was seen as both the great democratizer of knowledge but also as something that was going to make us dumber. We fretted about television; the constant barrage of low-brow stimulus, junk food for our brains. The radio was feared as a tool of propaganda and mass hysteria. Even writing. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of the Egyptian god who invented writing and gifted it to humanity. The king responds: “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls…They will appear to be omniscient and they will generally know nothing.” These examples are typically raised to show that fear of AI is overblown. Years after the introduction of the internet, and TV, and radio, and the written word, we’re all…fine. Right? All of these critiques are related to the same phenomenon that has been creeping through history, and none of them are wrong. There is not a person in modern society who has the capacity for oral storytelling that our ancestors did. In the 19th century, coal miners would read Thucydides, and Charles Dickens’ readership in America was comparable to the number of people who watch the Super Bowl. Today, even someone like me, the guy standing here asking you to read books and write your own essays, has a difficult time reading one unless my phone is in another room. You watch enough YouTube shorts and eventually movies are going to feel harder to get through. But each one of these technologies has also brought about new forms of human connection and art, and new means to expand our intellect. We want simple answers. We want clarity around which AI tools are going to enhance our abilities and which will diminish it. AI good, or bad? But the truth is that nobody can give you those answers because it’s not just one question. It is a series of questions that you are going to be asking yourselves every day from here on out. When you read Shakespeare or study calculus or the human cell, it is not because you are expected to use these things, exactly. You’re probably not going to make a living reciting Shakespeare in the park. Most of us are never going to wrap our heads around the equations that hold up our bridges and buildings, or understand the mechanisms by which medicines save lives. But we learn about the ideas at their foundation because there exists in you the possibility that one day you will decide they matter to you, and this possibility must be nurtured for its own sake. Once you stop asking whether you're ever going to use this, that, in my experience, is when the real learning starts. It has been my pleasure to address you all here today, and I wish you nothing but the best. On household tasks  The Floor Scrapers, Gustave Caillebotte, 1875 As I write this, there is a 70-foot black walnut tree that, for the last several weeks, has been raining down its fruit across my backyard. These walnuts are encased in a husk about the size and colour of a tennis ball. When they drop, they split, splattering a deep black tar over everything including but not limited to: my stone patio; the white bannister on my upstairs deck; whatever patio furniture I, in my profound arrogance, left out there; my dogs; me. Sometimes they are run through with maggots. They smell like lemongrass and decay. It is an unholy mess.
For a few weeks, we rearrange our lives around the walnuts. I cannot let my dogs out in my backyard because they will step in the tar and bring it into the house (and also the wood, the leaves, and the walnuts themselves are toxic to them). The constant percussive knock against our roof and deck sends our dog Marlowe scampering for a place to hide. You have to pick them up everyday, but you can’t leave them in those paper yard waste bags longer than a few days, otherwise they start to ferment and seep black filth everywhere. They are also heavy. If you fill the bags up too much, the collection guys slap a sticker on them and refuse to take them, which means that the approximately 1,600 pounds of the stuff that you hauled out to the curb you now have to haul back to the murder scene that is your garage and wait another two weeks. God forbid the bags break. The only workable solution I’ve found so far has been to create a small mountain on my gravel driveway, then allocate about two hours of my day to bagging them immediately before collection. My wife complained about the walnuts recently. She said — correctly — that they are disgusting. She has refused, on principal, to personally handle them beyond raking them into piles that I then consolidate and bag. I suspect that during walnut season she dreams of destroying the tree. I understand why she might feel this way, but I don’t. The walnut tree is a special part of our home. It is probably over 100 years old. There is also something simple and mechanical about the walnut cleanup that I find satisfying. It’s become a ritual, like mowing the lawn or shovelling the driveway (I refuse to get a snowblower). I actually kind of like the smell. What I’m saying is, I don’t mind doing it. * If you were to ask people who know me, I would be described variously and occasionally pejoratively but never as "a guy who likes doing things around the house.” I made this obvious to my wife when we moved in by bitching on a consistent basis about the projects we had taken on: painting, redoing the kitchen counters, ripping out and then installing a new backsplash, wainscotting the office, wallpapering, re-finishing the upstairs bathroom, re-configuring the dining room (approx. 47 times), tearing out and replacing the wooden trim around our front door, re-sodding about 300 square feet of my backyard. At one point she decided to turn our two hallway closets into 3/4 closets with little cubby slash bedrooms for the dogs in the bottom of them. She custom made dog pillows and even wallpapered the inside. They're adorable. All of the projects have made our home a much nicer place to live, and they have made me a more capable human being for having done them (read: helped her with them). Next, she wants to re-finish all the hardwood flooring on our main level, and while we’re at it, replace the popcorn ceiling in our family room and re-paint the walls and the trim, which again is all great but also *petulant whining sound*. Like other men of limited capacity, I have had what you might characterize as breakdowns during many of these projects. One day earlier in the year, I spent approximately four hours trying to install a bidet that simply would not stop leaking. I initially budgeted about 30 minutes for this particular task, and two days later a plumber (which I had hired to do something else) walked in and fixed it in 45 seconds. If I had a therapist, this failure would have been top of the docket for a few sessions. I did not want to quit. In fact I had resolved not to quit, and probably would have spent much more time trying and failing if I did not have to move on. Worse than my tendency to become a miserable prick in these situations, my wife has learned to count on it. Gen made a comment about how much easier it was to work with her dad to hang up a small gallery wall at her family cottage because she knew he would not get so easily frustrated. I felt that. I know I should be more like that. There is no reason why I cannot be like that. Yet, I am not. * The previous owners of this house talked about the walnuts like a great burden, but I find a sense of assurance in their inevitability. You cannot fail. You just have to do it. With those other projects, you might do something wrong. You might make a mistake. You might not be able to do it. You might do a bunch of work and fail. It's different. The thing I have learned, but haven’t yet fully accepted, is that that’s bullshit. The two kinds of work are the same, which means there is a simple solution to this little personal dilemma I've presented: just do the fucking work. Stop fighting it. Stop being a child. The more comfortable you get with just doing things — and failing, and re-doing them, and then maybe failing one more time before you finally call a professional or your father-in-law, who’ll stand there examining your handiwork with a look that says “you should have called me two attempts ago, buddy” — the better equipped you are to walk that road. I remember when I was a young, wet-behind-the-ears writer. I used to get edits back on my first drafts and feel really set-back. I had worked hard, thought carefully, and someone else would take one look at it like "nope, try again." Now, I understand. None of it is unfair, most of it is necessary, and in this case, all of it is what makes this place special. Your home is yours, which means the time and effort you invest in taking care of it cannot be wasted.  The Empire of Light, René Magritte, 1954 Every two weeks, our advertising agency convenes its regular AI committee. We spend about an hour listening to our very diligent and well-informed committee chair run through important new developments in the world of AI and how it might pertain to our day-to-day work: photo to video animation, text to video animation, bountiful new libraries of AI stock imagery, machine generated podcasts (irritating hosts and all), and much more.
Often, I will steer these meetings off-course when I point out that AI sucks, which is a valid thing to do because AI sucks. I’m not talking about the kind used in medical research or to talk to whales or whatever else the whitecoats with fancy degrees use it for and which is probably, for the most part, fine. I’m talking about creative work. Herein, I will outline some of the levels on which “creative” AI sucks. Level 1: It’s Not Interesting Many people seem to believe that 1) AI can be used as “a tool” to produce interesting work or 2) eventually, it will be able to produce interesting work autonomously. Creative work has two characteristics: it demonstrates intention (sometimes the intention is to demonstrate a conspicuous absence of intention) and, through that intention, attempts to differentiate itself from the bulky mass of other work. By definition, AI cannot do these things on its own, but more importantly, it’s not designed to help you do it either. The AI we use today is an averaging machine. It swallows vast swathes of data to churn out aggregates of those inputs. At its best, these are high-fidelity averages — exquisite replicas. That’s why we evaluate generative AI today not based on how interesting the outputs are but on how accurately they resemble work done by a human being with a pulse. This is the whole point of something like a Turing Test, which is being bandied around to prove that AI is creative. It doesn’t. Creative work is, at its foundation, a human thing. This is built into the way we interact with it. That's why “robotic” or “this looks/sounds like AI” tends not to to be something you want to hear said about your work. AI is designed to take you out of the creative process, less a tool than a collaborator to which you outsource your creative decisions. Interesting work produced with AI can only result by first vetting then circumventing, overriding, or approving the choices AI has made on our behalf. Level 2: It’s Displacing People Who Are Interesting Producing uninteresting or derivative work is not the biggest problem (you can skip to level 4 for that). People do it all the time, but they (we) are at least trying to not do it. But people (we, us) are slow and expensive, and even after a lot of time there’s no guarantee they (we) are going to reliably produce interesting stuff. Not to mention the intangibles like they might be difficult to work with, or using company time to write lengthy and probably pointless blogs. This is where you begin to see the business case for AI. Instead of hiring someone new or contracting a freelancer, management might keep on a handful of trusted idea people to sift through the slop that comes out of the machine. The ideas will suffer, but perhaps not enough (or not quickly enough) for most people to notice. More importantly, though, the pipeline aspiring creatives who want to set out on the long, arduous path of getting better at producing interesting work begins to buckle and break. Creative work was precarious to begin with. It's going to get less viable, and sustained interest — the kind required to develop the skills and the tastes and the motivation to do the job well — will wane. Level 3: It’s Degrading Our Sense of What’s Interesting AI gets a bad rap because its systems are built on theft. But stealing does not disqualify AI as creative. You can elevate ripping someone off to an art form, but AI can’t. With AI, even theft is boring. Given that creative AI exists mostly as a shortcut, we can safely assume that people who use AI are going to become even more hands-off as AI gets “better.” As this filter disappears, more AI-generated content will proliferate. This matters because good taste is as much about your diet as it is about your palette (so to speak). And when there’s more junk food out there, appetites begin to change. This feedback loop will also very likely affect the capabilities of future AI models. In 2023, one researcher raised the alarm on what has become known as the Habsburg AI, a phenomenon wherein AI-generated outputs begin to form a greater portion of AI training data. It is named after the European royal family that was famously deformed and driven insane by inbreeding. Level 4: It’s Making Me Less Interesting I would be arguing in bad faith if I had not used AI myself in an honest, open-minded attempt to keep abreast of the latest trends or whatever. I’ve found it useful as an early stage search engine substitute and for a handful of boilerplate copywriting tasks. Those results typically require enough follow-up and editing that they aren’t much of a timesaver, nor do I believe the final product was meaningfully improved with these new inputs. But in a different world — one where I was perhaps less motivated to find fault with this technology and cared less about doing my job well — I could imagine myself being lulled into a sense of complacency with some of these results. I could see my faculties eroding as I learned to accept all the results that are "good enough", kind of the way my forebears forgot how to forage and read paper maps. Will I change my mind about this one day? Perhaps. I am aware that I sound like your grandfather. Some of my colleagues have found AI useful to generate animations, stylized stock imagery, and for certain video editing applications. I am sure these applications will become more useful in their capacity to generate better quality ripoffs of human work. Perhaps there will be new applications and novel models that will make me wrong about all this. DJs make music. Illustrators don’t need to know how to draw. Despite all I’ve written, perhaps there will be more thoughtful creatives who use AI in ways that force similar changes. Perhaps. But that doesn't seem to be the direction in which we're headed. Whatever your definition of creative work, there is almost always an effort to communicate. AI undermines that. As Ted Chiang pretty convincingly argued, even cliched, unclear, or bad writing with a real effort to communicate contains something that is missing from coherent machine-generated writing. I think that’s true of creative work generally. Every day I see more writing that no-one has bothered to write; images that the “creators” have barely looked at; content that exists for no discernible reason except to farm clicks, to mislead, to automate a creative process that can’t be automated. AI is already an unstoppable force in our line of work. But frankly, the time I’ve spent enumerating the reasons AI sucks could have been spent creating stuff that doesn’t. So, that’s enough. Back to work. Ice doesn't last long anywhere on Earth, even ice that is older than humanity  The Iceberg, Frederic Edwin Church, 1875 Sometime in 2017, a team of scientists plunged a drill into the ancient blue ice in a region of Antarctica known as the Allan Hills and pulled out a core that was more than 13 times older than the human race.
Ice does not last long anywhere on Earth, not even in the cold, dark heart of the miles-thick monoliths covering the Antarctic continent. Over millions of years these vast frozen oceans flow over the peaks and canyons of the land far below them. The heat from the bedrock melts the oldest ice at the bottom and winds strip away the newest at the top. When those scientists pulled that core sample, it was 1.7 million years older than any other they had found on the planet to date. The ice caps are melting is probably not a sentiment that fills you with dread. It feels too familiar, too inert to inspire a reaction. Ice melts. But next time you see one of those headlines, I want you to think about this particular piece of ice. Every empire that shifted the tides of history has lasted just a fragment of its existence. It is older than industry, than civilization, than art, than religion, than war, perhaps even than human thought itself. Before there was that ice cube, there was nothing of us. There is a rift between time as we understand it and time as it exists for that piece of ice. Our experience renders the latter inaccessible, alien. If human time is like is the octopus that might end up on your dinner plate on one of the the Greek Islands, geologic time is not just a bigger octopus but Cthulhu, a force beyond human reckoning. It’s something we can only begin to reckon with through inadequate metaphors about, say, tentacled sea creatures. The task, however — of trying to understand it — is as old as our species. That is, in part, what names are for. * In Iceland about 10% of the country is covered by glaciers. These glaciers are fixtures in the lives of the people there. They are a part of their towns and their culture. Their meltwater feeds their rivers, farms, and wells. Occasionally the volcanoes they conceal melt them from the inside, erupting in sudden glacial floods known as jökulhlaup. They have carved much of the island’s spectacular landscapes and they attract the tourists who are the lifeblood of Iceland’s economy . The glaciers there all have these beautifully direct names. Eyjafjallajökull, for example, translates to "glacier of the mountains of the islands” which is exactly what it is. The largest, Vatnajökull, or “glacier of the lakes,” is known for the subglacial lakes created by volcanic activity. Langjökull or “long glacier,” is 50km long but less than 20km wide. Like all good names these ones are both a reflection of the objects they describe and of the people describing them. They’re austere, but they also invest these glaciers with a personality; they make them characters of the landscape. When you begin to think of glaciers this way, it makes sense then that the people would mourn their loss as a kind of death. In 2014, when the glacier Okjökull melted to a point that it could no longer be called a glacier, the locals created a memorial. There’s a plaque and everything. “‘Ok' is the first glacier to lose its status as a glacier,” it says. “In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.” A film crew made a documentary about the loss. “This is not a tale of spectacular, collapsing ice,” they say. “Instead, it is a little film about a small glacier on a low mountain — a mountain who has been observing humans for a long time and has a few things to say to us.” * I work at an advertising agency whose clients are mostly homebuilders. When they're getting ready to build a new community, they come to us to give it a name. These names tend to be remarkably anodyne, basically a container for boilerplate messaging and lifestyle imagery conveying how great it would be to live there. They don’t usually provide much information about what we’re naming. It’s sort of beside the point anyways. They seem to prefer names like “Grand River Heights” regardless of topography, grandeur, or proximity to a river. A couple years ago, I remember seeing a headline about a piece of ice twice the size of Chicago that broke off the Antarctic’s Brunt Ice Shelf. Two months later, another piece of ice half the size of Puerto Rico broke away from the Ronne Ice Shelf. These icebergs were named A74 and A76, respectively. To me, those names are perfect. The bland taxonomy is at once ideally suited to and at memorably at odds with the blank majesty of these sublime frozen continents consigned to oblivion. The letter represents the region where the iceberg originated and the number represents the order in which it broke away. When they break into smaller pieces, they get simple addenda: A74 becomes A74a, A74b, and so on. We use similar naming conventions for stars, another set of innumerable and otherworldly objects labelled with a modesty and utility that properly reflects our relationship with them. These names also help bridge the gap between something beyond our realm of experience and something within it. Icebergs can be just as immense as glaciers and ice contained in them may be just as old. But in the moment they break away, time shifts. Geologic time becomes human time. The ice becomes a mere object. Whether that object is the size of a tractor or the size of Belgium (as the largest iceberg in history was reputed to be), whether it’s in a few days or several decades, it will eventually be gone. We do not mourn these objects. These names reveal what the names of Icelandic glaciers obscure: that ice melts. * Barry Lopez is a writer who has been compared to Melville among documentarians of the natural world. In one chapter of Arctic Dreams, his masterpiece, he describes setting out by ship from Montreal into the waters north of Labrador bound for the Northwest Passage. He was following the journey taken by famous explorers like Frobisher and Baffin. “I had come to see the ice that silenced them all,” he writes. "The first icebergs we had seen just north of the straight of Belle Isle, listing and guttered by the ocean, seemed immensely sad, exhausted by some unknown calamity … Farther north, they began to seem like stragglers, fallen behind an army, drifting self-absorbed in the water, bleak and immense. It was as if they had been borne down from a world of myth, some Götterdämmerung of noise and catastrophe, fallen pieces of the moon. Farther to the north, they stood on their journeys with greater strength. They were monolithic. Their walls — towering and abrupt — suggested Potala Palace at Lhasa in Tibet, a mountainous architecture of ascetic contemplation.” Lopez is not subtle about the fact that his experience of these objects borders on the holy; that when he saw them it was as though he had been waiting quietly for a very long time “as if for an audience with the Dalai Lama.” Which makes sense. Like religious experiences, they brush up against the outer limits of our understanding: their dimensions in space and time, hidden from us; their elegant features in a perpetual state of change, carved and erased by the constant movement of the sea. Even seeing them, they rarely appear as they are. They play tricks on the eye as they peak over the horizon from great distances, the variegated hues of the sun trapped and dancing in their crystalline structures. We cannot know them, and that is why I think we will have lost something when they are gone. You may threaten the future of civilization, but I can’t seem to live without you  In 2019 the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom was thinking about the things that might kill us.
In his vulnerable world hypothesis, Bostrom asks us to picture human creativity as the process of pulling marbles out of a giant urn. The white ones represent inventions or discoveries that enrich humanity. The grey ones are a mixed blessing; think nuclear fission which has given us nuclear power but also nuclear weapons. Bostrom says at some point we will pull a black marble from the urn, “a technology that invariably or by default destroys the civilization that invents it.” Since we’re still here Bostrom believes this hasn’t happened yet, but I’m not so sure. We may have drawn one back at the dawn of the industrial revolution and are only now coming to terms with the implications of our invention. For the first 150 or so years of its existence, this technological marvel was thought to be harmless. It became the lifeblood of our economies and energy systems. It heats our homes and fuels our way across land, air, and sea. Almost anything can be made from it. Discoveries cannot be undiscovered, so once any marble comes out of the urn it cannot go back in. This marble is different, though. Even if we could put it back, we probably wouldn’t. It is too good to give up. I. The Oil Defender’s Gambit Oil is an amazing substance. This has never been in dispute, yet it seems to be a point of confusion when we talk about our dependency on it. These conversations usually go something like this: I attend a rally against fossil fuels which, at the rate we are burning them, threaten to change our climate in the coming centuries in ways that imperil human civilization. I think this is bad. I would prefer civilization was not imperilled. A friend, or perhaps one of my enemies, later sees a few of my pictures from the rally and helpfully points out that people do not attend rallies to protest substances they think are amazing. He notes that the car I drove there runs on fossil fuels; the lid on the coffee I picked up beforehand is made with oil derivatives; the supply chain that brought that coffee to my local coffee purveyor is powered by oil. But why stop there? I might respond. That car I drove? You need oil to make the tires, the seats, and most of the vehicle itself before you put anything in the tank. The house I live in? The paint, the caulking, the shingles, the plumbing. Oil again. My clothes, the ones I wore to the rally probably, are woven from synthetics that wouldn’t exist without oil. My shoes, oil. The computer on which I’m typing this, the seat I’m sitting on, cold medicine, chewing gum, toothpaste, deodorant… Exactly! My interlocutor says. It is hypocritical to ask that we stop using oil when you yourself rely on it every day. Which, fair. Running water, computers, takeout coffee, shelter — all good things. If my convictions obligate me to give up not just the conveniences of modern life, but the clothes off my back and the roof over my head, I am a hypocrite. But the fact that I can’t stop contributing to the problem shouldn’t be taken as an indication that it’s not really a problem. That’s why it’s a problem. II. A Miracle of The Modern Age Maybe the modern world didn’t have to be this way. In the early 1900s, electric cars were considered superior to gasoline-powered ones. They were faster, more maneuverable, and more reliable. And besides, “you can’t get people to sit over an explosion,” one high-profile investor predicted confidently in 1896. Yet following the Second World War, when the U.S. factories manufacturing armaments went back to making civilian wares, a new exercise in nation building got underway. A few missteps by top electric car companies, cheap fuels, some clever marketing, and America’s burgeoning car culture became entirely gasoline powered. Strip malls, highways, suburbia, and huge swathes of modern infrastructure owe their existence to that culture. As one documentarian of the era noted, “Had this period of random technological mutation selected for the electric, the social history of America would be unrecognizable.” Then there are plastics, a fossil fuel byproduct. Did we have to make everything out of plastic? Probably not, but in the 1960s this novel material was regarded as a miracle. I don’t mean this in the colloquial sense. I mean plastic could do things that the laws of nature seemed not to permit. It didn’t break like glass. It was cheap, reproducible, and could be molded into virtually anything that would last basically forever. “The hierarchy of substances is abolished,” Roland Barthes writes in one essay. “A single one replaces them all.” Then there are oil’s applications for which there is no suitable substitute. There is no substance like jet fuel, nor will there be for the foreseeable future. The only way the average Canadian can experience the world outside of driving distance — Tokyo, Cape Town, Tangiers, Rome — is if we decide to keep running the vast machine that extracts the remains of primordial creatures from the earth and burns them. It’s impossible to imagine life without oil. It has shaped everything from our daily lives to the world’s cultures and macro systems in ways that transcend any individual’s understanding or moral judgment. Is oil bad? That’s like asking if technology is bad. Or the sea. It's too big to fit in the question. III. Oil’s Greatest Trick There are new omens that now demand our attention, mostly because of how easy they are to ignore. Plastics that won’t naturally degrade for centuries are swirling in ocean patches larger than the Maritimes. In a few decades, there’ll be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Nanoplastics are flowing through my blood stream and yours. We don’t know what that means for our health, exactly, but we know our bodies can’t process it. In your lifetime you’ll eat an estimated 44 pounds of the stuff. As Jeannette Cooperman darkly points out in one essay, you'd have an easier time digesting a seven-year-old. After one cross-Atlantic flight, my personal greenhouse gas emissions from this singular event exceed the annual total of the average resident of 56 countries. These tend to be countries that are uniquely vulnerable to increased storm severity, drought, flooding, crop failures, political unrest, civil conflict, and a whole host of interrelated issues that are exacerbated by the airline industry, our energy systems, and basically every other oil-powered system on which civilized life depends. You may think it’s an exaggeration to say climate change may lead to the collapse of civilization within the next few hundred years. Maybe it is. But consider: our dependence on oil is changing the climate faster than an extinction event in earth’s distant past that extinguished 95% of all animal life. That event might have taken as little as 100,000 years, the geological equivalent of the click of a camera shutter. And those are fucking rookie numbers compared to what we're doing now. A recent paper found that earth's wildlife populations have plunged nearly 70% on average in the last 50 years. We feel insulated from these forces but we are not. The end of civilization will come long before the end of human life, and there are many degrees of hardship and unpleasantness between the two that not even our most pessimistic prophets can fathom. Civilization is not a robust construct. Push hard enough in the right places and things begin breaking faster than they can be fixed. Yet, oil is so enchanting that it pushes these things to the mind’s peripheries. I want to find better ways to live without oil, but in the meantime, I have places to go and things to get done and I need oil to do almost all of them. There are dozens of factors that affect my choices, and concerns over the continued prosperity of civilization tend to get drowned out by the hum of the car engine or lost amid the excitement of a package just-arrived from a distant factory or disappear into the quiet anticipation at an airport gate. IV. A World Remade Could we have said no? Even if we could foresee our current predicament, could we forgo everything oil has made possible? If we had, the connections between our cities would likely look something like they did in the 18th century. Comforts, conveniences, and technologies beyond the imagining of history’s richest royals and aristocrats, now democratized, gone. The wealth of entire nations, left in the ground. We can’t even say no now. Saying no at the dawn of the industrial revolution might have seemed as foolish as continuing the course we’re on today. We often love things that are bad for us, but there are few vices that could be said to be essential. Maybe that's the honest appraisal we need to begin to remake the world without oil. I don’t know what that new world will look like or how to get there, but I’m certain that if we look far enough into the future, a world where we fail won’t look anything like ours today. Originally commissioned by BESIDE magazine, a which is great and visually stunning publication that you should read and support. Issue 13 is coming out soon. |