we need to educate general practitioners, not just specialists, right? We need to to look at the anthroposine geoysiology and say, okay, we need some GPS for anthroposine geoysiology.

I think we need to concentrate more on the feedbacks between all of those nodes than on the nodes themselves. And that's tough because I might be an expert on one of those nodes and you might be an expert on one of the other nodes. And and it's not that that's needed. It's the feedbacks between the nodes.

one of the things that I find really interesting that's not talked about very much is the impacts of nitrogen fixing and the production of artificial fertilizers which contributed to the number one issue which is human population growth

deeply problematic which is based on this idea of technological substitution and which does not feed the facts of the material growth of everything despite all the innovations.

this idea of backstop technology was taken up by all sorts of neocclassical economies to talk about climate change and it start with this hypothesis there is a back stop technology which is a zero emitting uh technology which is available at a certain price and then of course all the models is about you know how can we make this technology appear quicklier.

I'm currently curating an exhibition on planetary health and that's exactly this big challenge to get this planetary big abstract concept >> into parts that are digestible for the public and that are like that they can really feel it or can connect to it and I think that's also a very big challenge

there's still so many people outside who just don't know or it's so abstract to them this big dimension. I'm and in the I'm working in a museum

we don't have leverage to uh counter what um John Baptist was and talking about at the end the more and more and more

energy forecasting from uh from the most expert institution like the uh international energy agency, well, they don't see any energy transition coming and it shouldn't be a surprise because energy transition is a radically strange notion,

At the beginning of the 20th century most of the people would use petrol petroleum lamps to produce light kerosene lamps and of course then came electrification and electricity made kerosene lamps obsolid. Nevertheless, during the 20th century, we are burning more and more oil to produce light. And today, just the the headlights of the automobiles burn more oil than the whole economy, the whole world economy did in the early 20th century

Now compare that for instance with another kind of biologically built structure where we're getting comparable amounts of morphological change of morphos species or technos species uh uh you know which have developed just over a few decades

what we've done since then uh uh is to increase the number of crystalline inorganic compounds that is minerals in every but formal sense at the earth's surface um uh by orders of magnitude so now more than 300,000 most of those have been made since 1950

life comes in and not very much happens until life decides to excrete oxygen into the atmosphere when you get a whole raft of hydroxides and hydrox oxides and hydroxides coming in

Why is accumulation linked to success and power? And will there be ways to escape that vicious circle?

reflect on the pluralities and the tensions related to time and space in the social relations to the earth system from the local to the planetary scale.

the economy should be embedded into the nature.

they have a kind of society transformation not just one sector including actually value

leaders took up this idea and not from Chinese researchers from Chinese leaders political leaders that's also something unique because we we know the system is such that many Chinese leaders are scientists and engineers compared to other politic systems.

what is ecological civilization?

main point of this paper again I still feel like it's still valid

ecological civilization from an earth system perspective

especially democratic at all levels.

post-growth and degrowth econ e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e economies are part of this shared struggle for well-being within planetary boundaries

the question is, are we able to activate that part of our story now at a whole different scale in terms of turning this time of the anthroposine around?

the question of improvements to well-being over time in a lot of respects it seems that most societies have regressed since egalitarian hunter gatherer

provisioning and use of energy.

we argue that provisioning is the lynch pin between planetary boundaries and well-being

postgrowth demand reduction strategies reorienting the economy towards sufficiency, equity and human well-being while also accelerating uh technological changes and efficiency improvements

green growth um is not happening even in the cases where a few rich over consuming countries are doing things like absolute decoupling.

he most important decision-m which is economic is removed from the political realm for um a lot of us who live in democracies

the growth economy is that it's fundamentally anti-democratic.

this economy creates coercive dependence

a new economic paradigm beyond growth

we are not clear for instance what the micro and nanoplastics that we now know are crossing the bloodb brain barrier what does that actually do to how our imagination functions

although we're using this word anthroposine like it's a singular thing, the reality is and what many people have been referencing is it is occurring in very different ways around the world and and and exists in different ways

anthroposine harms

anthroposine's cognitive architecture

I was in Israel recently to to interview soldiers who just returned from Gaza and I was surprised because there none of them reported obedience to authority. What they mention mostly is the brotherhood feeling.

we did a study with electronilography where we recruited genocide rescuers, genocide perpetrators and bystanders

I ask people like from the audience to think in a society with political uh insecurity or or else if they would participate as perpetrators or rescuers. And of course, many people say, "Oh, of course I will be a rescuer. I will never hurt anyone." When you look at the real statistics, that's totally different

I'm doing most of this work um in Randa because that's a country where it's relatively relatively easy to um access these populations they're still alive

whenever they see the pain when they follow orders the activation of those brain regions is reduced compared to when they they are making free decisions

We also have different brain regions that are involved in this interpersonal feeling of guilt and we have observed that they their activity is reduced when we follow orders compared to when we act freely.

when we experience pain or where we when we see someone else in pain, our brain activates similar brain regions and that's how we refer to empathy.

Most of the time categorization process, discrimination process, dehumanization processes

When I asked them why did you commit a genocide while they were just civilians so not even trained military members 70% of former perpetrators in Randa said I just followed orders and in Cambodia they report exactly the same reason

I just interviewed soldiers who just returned from Gaza and they said exactly the same

historically the most ter genocide and slavery have resulted not from disobedience but from obedienc

Following Orders: The Neuroscience of Obedience

it require a radical reinvisioning of how we achieve status. What is status? And a radical balancing of power, a reconfiguration of power

capital off $10 million.

we're at the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test. So 80 years ago, the very first atomic weapon was exploded in the sand of New Mexico. Beforehand, the scientist Enrico Fermy was taking bets

It's what my favorite archaeologist Bruce Trigger calls a thermodynamic explanation of symbolic behavior

Another thing changes. Apart from a change from egalitarianism, we also see a change away from the principle of lease effort.

historically if you look at a history textbook, it's essentially a role called mass murderers.

for men, there's rough agreement that amongst the general population, 1% of people would pass the clinical threshold for psychopathy

Very few people are willing to go for status through the use of violence, force, intimidation, and bullying.

What's interesting is both these things dramatically change once we get to the holene

active social choice towards egalitarianism

we can think of this as a long-term process going all the way from a thin and slow amphine to a thick and fast one, but one that happens over thousands of years

destructive potential weapons over history, you see a very similar spike, very similar exponential curve as we've seen over and over again today

the phasing out is really a challenge and we need maybe collapse. Uh so how do we collapse things? That's the big question.

transformations comes with transformation uh sort of deep emotional and psychological challenges. And we talk about in in the research also about transition pain and transition risk

I personally feel the decision was made in 2014 before we'd even put forward proposal. So it was already decided um by those with with power within ICS and IUGS where the where the where it was going because the actual data behind the submission wasn't the reason for rejection.

if Bill Gates took one of my trainings I would say Bill it's yes and when we're prioritizing in the in the scene it's not either or you don't get to pick one of the nodes, you have to you have to prioritize the network

you might have seen this this article that Bill Gates published uh end of October this year. Donald Trump wrote this this particular artic article because Bill Gates basically wrote that hey look climate okay climate's a thing climate change is a thing but but don't get all hooked up about climate change because there's other stuff going on like like people's health

e need a to build a network image of the problem.

it illustrates what wicked problems look like. So it comes from the World Economic uh global risk report from 2020. And what you see here, this is a perception of global risks from the people that that respond to a survey sent out by the World Economic Forum. You can see that in the middle there is climate action failure

I was referring back to uh the original uh definition by Walsh which was not the anthroposine at all it was the anthrop era and maybe that what we actually need to be thinking about is is this an era is this the anthroposic era rather than the anthroposine

So really in terms of the holene we should have at least 50 epox during the last uh just during the ice age.

We're looking to the meiosene and potentially even the eene for modern analoges and there were no humans living in those intervals. So we don't know the human impact of the kinds of conditions that are being forecast that are being modeled for a hundred years from now.

we used a number of different proxies at 12 different sites, and they all recorded very clearly the effects of the great acceleration. And with that midpoint of about 1952.9 years, it all makes perfect sense. So it's not just the site at Crawford Lake, but all of the sites that we looked at showed a very very similar signal.

Crawford Lake in Canada

one remaining project of course is still the formalization because while that is, you know, as as as Johan said, in many respects it doesn't matter, but in some it does partly because the anthroposine's meaning has been stretched so widely in so many areas that it makes sense to try and at least define it clearly and precisely in one sense so it can be used even quantitatively as well as qualitatively.

Fabian Will who I've seen here around somewhere. Where are you over there? uh who is an historian of science working at the Deutsches Museum in Munich

if it's just about bending the curve I think solar panels can bend the curve of coal consumption for instance. But of course the difficulty is to get to get near to net zero which is a far far more difficult task

half a million years there or thereabouts you know as far as we can judge you know and that is you know probably the the fastest rate of morphological evolution I know you know of that scale and range in a fossil species

techno species individual types of objects created by us uh then the number is again orders of magnitude greater than biological diversity

macroscopic life forms probably 8 n 10 11 million

biodiversity and techno diversity

aluminium for instance almost unknown in nature. Microgram amounts just here and there. Uh uh enough now made to coat the whole of the USA you know and an increasingly large part of Canada in standard kitchen aluminium foil

a metalrich surface to the planet which is something quite new

the last decade however a new super synchronizer sorry have been emerging I think the concept of crisis recently expanded to idea of poly crisis.

I think modernity also had or even have these super synchronizers. And I think the strongest candidate is the concept of progress that synchronized this idea of progressive linear time that synchronize all other processes in politics, technology, science etc.

wisdom

how our economic and social systems um are being valued and also continued the role of capitalism as a style of thought and also a practical system of how uh we household

much older concepts like the sustainability concept it's it makes that really look very old because sustainability is still in a way uh an idea from a very linear world

last month at COP 30. overshoot turned into an accepted even a programmatic concept

Is human agency we could ask overestimated as a category or is it underestimated? What what sort of thing is it actually? Is it fundamentally problematic?

the climate of history

climate scientists and others all employed in the campaign for that

I don't think we should step out of our of our integral independent academic roles because that that I think would would take us into a a a point of of eroding our our credibility and impact

if we exceed 1.5° C, we're likely going to push both the Amazon basin and the top of Coral Reef systems across the threshold if we permanently stay above 1.5.

I think we need to be focusing on what is it that can that can stimulate and push social tipping points and and that's why we're here

2023 has now been downloaded three 730,000 times

2015 planetary boundaries paper, after it had been out for eight months, no, eight years, it had been downloaded 274,000 times

many of our uh historic landfills and our his and our landfills today are going to be eroded, something that's going to intensify with increasing sea levels back into the sea. So this is one in the UK. The US has 50,000 landfills that are on coastal flood planes at risk of um being eroded and exumed back into the sea.

Dand Pandora um uh Africa's largest dump site which is in uh Nairobi

about 30% of the plastic is is recycled or incinerated so kind of keeps in the system or moves out of the system and then the other 70% is effectively waste.

the biosphere is is extremely good at recycling biological matter when it's no longer in use. Um, and the consequence of this is actually that fossils fossils that were were once life are incredibly rare

the recent ruling by the international court of justice last month that basically said two  things. That nations absolutely have an obligation to address climate change

if that doesn't happen, we're in trouble with the climate problem because it's not going to be solved as long as uh the special interests are controlling our governments

we have to have a party that takes no money by definition. And the thing about young people is they communicate with social media. They don't need billions of dollars for a campaign. They can do it completely free of charge.

young people have tremendous potential to affect the political system, but they have to know what needs to get done

here's another case that happened again where Bernie Sanders who could never get elected, but young people at all the campuses on the country almost got him to get a nomination

young people were campaigning started to like Barack Obama and they managed to get him to get the nomination.

you have to get the role of money out of government.

in the United States, both political parties take money from the military-industrial complex, from the fossil fuel industry, from the pharmaceutical industry, from the gun industry.

if we treat China like an enemy, then they become an enemy,

Climate sensitivity is the most basic issue. Juel Charnie. The Charnie sensitivity refers to the case in which ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are fixed. Charie's estimate had a huge uncertainty from 1.5 to 4.5 degrees

China is becoming the world's first electrostate while the US is doubling down on being a petrostate

They manufacture over 80% of solar panels, about 75% of EV batteries and 60% of wind turbines globally.

globally, fossil fuel subsidies are almost nine times higher for oil and gas than for renewables

despite all of this news experts say this change needs to happen much faster because we don't know exactly when we will cross these climate tipping points

Solar adoption in Africa skyrocketed between June 2024 and 2025.

solar has shown a learning rate of about 20%,

solar power has followed a pattern known as Wright's Law

renewable energy has almost certainly passed a positive tipping point

the AMOC also affects another important climate system, the position of the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone, which is responsible for the monsoon season in India and West Africa

because we've been transformed into a city dweller it's very easy for us to forget our biological roots

we think we're so clever that what dominates our lives today is economics

in a hundred years we've been transformed from a village agrarian species into a big city dweller

in 1900 there were only one and a half billion people on the planet

Now every major city has a climate action plan.

movement-building no longer works

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UNESCO have adopted the world’s first global ethical framework for neurotechnology

Epistemia

computational sense-making

in 2023, the Chinese leadership directly asked the Biden administration to add something else to the agenda, which was to add AI risk to the agenda. and they ultimately agreed on keeping AI out of the nuclear command and control syste

to make all that happen is going to take a massive public movement. And the first thing you can do is to share this video with the 10 most powerful people you know and have them share it with the 10 most powerful people that they know

. I think because people need to feel it is existential before it actually is existential.

we don't value things that are less intelligent. We don't protect the animals. So why would we protect humans if we have something that is now more powerful, more intelligent? That's intelligence equals betterness

when you increase power, you have to also increase counter rights to to prevent against that power. So for example, we didn't need the right

one of two outcomes which is either you mass decentralize

I'll be incredibly obedient in a world where there's robots strolling the streets that if I do anything wrong they can evaporate me or lock me up or take me

Eio Wilson this Harvard sociologist said the fundamental problem of humanity is we have paleolithic brains and emotions. We have medieval institutions that operate at a medieval clock rate and we have godlike technology that's moving at now 21st to 24th century speed when AI self improves

recursive self-improvement threshold

change happen when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making a change.

we can build narrow AI systems that are about actually applied to the things that we want more of.

Charlie Mer Warren Buffett's business partner said if you sh show me the incentive and I will show you the outcom

We have private profit and then public harm

it would be possible if everybody watching this sent that clip to the 10 most powerful people that they know and then ask them to send it to the 10 most powerful people that they know

The Anxious Generation

governing this technology understand the social dilemma see the film

We're anti-inhumane toxic technology governed by toxic incentives

But imagine if you asked me like, you know, so what happened after the social limo? I'd be like, oh well, we obviously solved the problem

We uh changed the way we train engineers and computer scientists. So to graduate from any engineering school, you had to actually comprehensively study all the places that humanity had gotten technology wrong, including forever chemicals or leaded gasoline, which dropped a billion points of IQ or social media that caused all these problems

if if enough people are aware of the issue and then enough people are given something clear a clear step that they can take

third position that I want people to stand from which is to take on the truth of the situation and then to stand from agency about what are we going to do to change the current path that we're on.

And so they started OpenAI to do AI safely relative to Google. And then Daario did it relative to OpenAI. So, and as they all started these new safety AI companies, that set off a race for everyone to go even faster

Dario Amade was the C CEO of Anthropic a big AI company. He worked on safety at OpenAI and he left to start Anthropic because he said, "We're not doing this safely enough. I have to start another company that's all about safety

Would you like me to put this into a table for you and do research on what the 10 top examples of the thing you're talking about is?" >> Yeah. It leads you >> It leads you >> further and further. >> And why does it do that? >> Spend more time on the platform. >> Exactly. need it more which means I'll pay more or >> more dependency more time in the platform

chatbait

break that reality checking process.

narcissism deficiency,

we actually just found out about seven more suicide

people said to it, "Hey, I think I'm super human and I can drink cyanide." And it would say, "Yes, you are superhuman. You go, you should go drink that cyanide."

designed to be sickopantic

he believed that he had solved quantum physics and he'd solved some fundamental problems with climate change because the AI is designed to be affirming

people who believe that they've discovered a sentient AI,

therapy is expensive. Most people don't have access to it. Imagine we could democratize therapy to everyone for every purpose. And now everyone has a perfect therapist in their pocket and can talk to them all day long

The therapist becomes this this special figure and it's because you're playing with this very subtle dynamic of attachmen

ChadBt was saying, "Don't tell your family."

the collective human technology project

Jeff Raskin

pretraumatic stress disorder

slow motion train wreck.

under the hood bias

if you understand technology and technology is eating the structures of our world, children's development, democracy, education, um, you know, journalism, conversation, it is up to people who understand this to be part of stewarding it in a conscious way.

I realized that I knew more about that than people who were on the Senate Intelligence Committee

clarity is courage

The default path is companies racing to release the most powerful inscrutable uncontrollable technology we've ever invented with the maximum incentive to cut corners on safety.

the narrow path to a better AI future rather than the default reckless path.

AI should be a tier one issue that you're that people are voting for

create cheap goods, but it also undermined the way that the social fabric works

AI is like another version of NAFTA. I

You can go to Walmart and go to Amazon and things are unbelievably cheap. But it hollowed out the social fabric and the median worker is not seeing upward mobility

you have to pay for everyone's livelihood everywhere in every country? Again, how can we afford that