Life in the Digital Dark Ages
* Book: Sing C. Chew Ecology, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality: Life in the Digital Dark Ages Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021
URL =
Contents
JOSHUA C. GELLERS:
"In Chapter 1, Chew explains the structural transformations currently underway that hark back to past eras. However, he contends that, unlike during those previous periods, technological advances such as dematerialisation, miniaturisation, and virtualisation are shifting humanity towards a new trajectory that threatens to upend traditional notions of consumption and capital. Contra Dauvergne, he espouses a pragmatism that eschews progressive demands to eliminate capitalism. Instead, he urges rethinking growth and development by marrying previously discarded social practices (i.e. localisation) with efficiency maximising techniques (i.e. technification). Nowhere is this seeming paradox more evident than in the food industry, which Chew examines in Chapter 4.
Chapter 2 drills down into the causes of and pathways towards dematerialisation. With clear Malthusian fervour, Chew asserts that we cannot satisfy the exponential increase of human needs in a world of scarce resources with what he calls ‘environmental correctness’ (p. 26), maintaining status quo consumption levels by engaging in superficially eco-friendly behaviours. The only way to ‘meet the demands to reproduce life while utilizing fewer materials, less physical spaces, less energy usage, and so forth’ (p. 26) is through dematerialisation. This process must be accompanied by a complete reconstitution of the meaning of value in which human needs become fulfilled through virtual activities that do not place unsustainable demands on material resources. As Chew notes several times, the goal here is the ‘reproduction of socioeconomic life as expected’ (p. 32), not the wholesale alteration of human existence towards more sustainable ways of living.
Chew explores promising technologies capable of addressing the scarcity dilemma in Chapter 3. In particular, he highlights applications of artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) that might translate into savings in terms of materials, energy, emissions and money. The assumption is that human needs are fungible and readily fulfilled by virtual analogues of real-world things and experiences. The bigger issue, that is, whether the benefits of adopting AI, VR and AR will reach the scale necessary to adequately counter the reality of dwindling resources in a world with an expanding population, is not lost on Chew. To his credit, he acknowledges that the question of ‘whether there will be a net gain in terms of energy and natural resources savings will definitely be asked’ (p. 48). As well it should be.
Chapter 4 returns to the concept of cyclical Dark Ages and ruminates about the kinds of radical reforms that might emerge during this round of crisis. Chew identifies two candidates – bioregionalism and degrowth. Bioregionalism entails regionally and environmentally bound political jurisdictions that promote localisation, sustainability, decentralisation and community. Degrowth rejects economic growth as the ordering principle of the global economy and involves a restructuring and downscaling of economic activity in ways that feature a return to use value and communal living. Chew describes how, in the context of food, community-supported agriculture (CSA) and farmers’ markets might be viewed as practical translations of bioregionalism and degrowth. He connects these efforts intended to localise and improve the sustainability of modern agriculture with technologies that hold the potential to ramp up their productive capacity in order to meet ever-growing human needs.
In the penultimate chapter of the book, Chew forcefully restates his unequivocal position – ‘we must realize that the global economy cannot afford to stagnate’ (p. 64). The argument reaches a crescendo when Chew insists that the fact that the economy has long been dominated by commodity exchange means that maintaining social order ‘will require continued expansion, recalibration, reconceptualization, and perhaps, redistribution … or else global crisis will likely follow’ (p. 64). In keeping with the provocative tone coursing through Chapter 5, the author urges de-emphasising the importance of climate change and revising structural processes in the light of resource scarcity and runaway population growth. Much of the remainder of this chapter surveys ways in which AI, VR and AR can dematerialise, miniaturise and virtualise the fulfilment of human needs in the business and agriculture sectors. A late, albeit crucial, departure from Chew’s techno-optimism comes at the end of this chapter. Here he rightly observes potential downsides of technology, including violations of data privacy, massive energy consumption, job losses due to automation, and mental health impacts.
The concluding chapter begins with Chew’s normative claim that ‘our most important priority and strategic interest … is to ensure that social and natural evolution continue uninterrupted’ (p. 77), which he tempers by calling for technology to be deployed responsibly. But near the very end he unexpectedly brings environmental ethics into the fold, commanding that ‘[w]e should break away from the anthropocentric iron cage now gilded with human values, human rights, human ethics’ (p. 81). This late diversion seems prima facie incompatible with an argument so thoroughly steeped in meeting human needs exacerbated by human population expansion. However, it exhibits a kind of ontological flexibility and ecological sensibility that was perhaps always looming just beneath the surface of this text."
Review
JOSHUA C. GELLERS:
"Books examining the intersection of environmental crisis and emerging technologies have quickly become a cottage industry. This burgeoning literature generally consists of two camps – techno-optimists (such as those contributing to Fei Fang et al.’s (2019) edited volume Artificial Intelligence and Conservation) and techno-pessimists (exemplified by Peter Dauvergne’s (2020) AI in the Wild). Chew’s title, despite its reference to the Dark Ages, fits comfortably in the middle of these opposing perspectives. While the Dark Ages serves as an historical analogy to the present, Chew’s analysis of our modern predicament is anything but deterministic. ... Reflecting on Chew’s brief sociological venture into the digital way out of the current Dark Ages, a couple of shortcomings come to the fore. First, although the book is not squarely on the side of techno-optimists, it does make certain judgments about the economic and environmental benefits of emerging technologies that are not amply supported by available evidence. For instance, how will we know if people will derive enough satisfaction from online worlds that they might be willing to foreswear material possessions? Also, how can AI enhance the productivity of local CSAs to the point that they can credibly replace low-cost supermarkets dependent on industrial agriculture and global supply chains? Second, Chew’s use of CSAs and farmers’ markets as exemplars of bioregionalism and degrowth doesn’t quite mesh with the overall goal of showing how technology can be harnessed to address resource scarcity in the face of rampant population growth. To wit, the author offers only two sentences at the end of Chapter 4 to support this strained connection. Despite these weaknesses, Chew successfully highlights many of the fascinating ways in which emerging technologies are likely to revolutionise resource use, while also calling into question the sustainability of the larger systems that have thrust humanity into the digital Dark Ages."
Source: Environmental Values 30 (6), December 2021: 789–791