Dex Hunter-Torricke

What happens when AI turbocharged industries consume wildly more resources and they destabilize already reeling ecosystems, which we know are hanging by a thread and which will impact the lives of millions, if not billions of people?

Between 2018 and 2023, the world consumed almost as much resources as one third of the 20th century.

And it's accelerating all the time.

And these are things where in fact, you know, big tech companies, they go to government who are desperate for economic growth now, right?

A lot of the advanced economies in the global north, they've got plateauing growth, they've got declining living standards.

They go to them and say,

build this wonder technology, build this infrastructure.

We will give you back the keys to a good future."

And of course, that's not happening.

This is something which on the present path promises to enrich a tiny sliver of societies, mostly in the United States, mostly in China.

And I think the world we're going to end up in, in the next 10, 15 years is going to be much more unstable than today,

with rapidly declining living standards for hundreds of millions of people.

I think a lot of graduates will not be able to get good jobs at all.

People who did a whole bunch of things in their lives and were told if they did these things right, they would get a good life and their kids would have better lives than them.

That is not going to happen at all on the path we're on.

Is the tech industry going to solve these things?

No.

And in fact, they have tried to minimize debate about these things.

They've tried to point people back towards the technical solutions.

Now it is a moment in which societies and our leaders need to have a mainstream conversation about what the heck we're going to do to manage all of those effects.