Why the mad, mad, wild West, after centuries of DGAF environmental destruction, colonialism, exploitation, and enormous consumption of the planet's resources, suddenly positions itself as guardians of Earth and humanity is because they have no MONOPOLY on AI

 

I know ChatGPT, and I also know the standard criticism of systems like GPT: when it cannot find a satisfactory answer, it will reinterpret the question, flatten its complexity, or answer a different question altogether simply because it needs to produce an answer. 

I have experienced that myself on so many occasions that I don't debate the validity of my position. So I want to be very clear about what I am actually asking and arguing here.

My question is this: How has the West, after centuries of environmental destruction, colonialism, exploitation, and enormous consumption of the planet's resources, suddenly positioned itself as a guardian of Earth and humanity at precisely the moment when artificial intelligence has begun to raise the possibility of threatening its own technological, economic, and geopolitical dominance?

When I refer to "the destroyer of the planet," I am speaking principally about the modern Western economic and political order—not about every individual. I am talking about the historical systems of European colonialism, industrial capitalism, imperialism, extractive economics, and the geopolitical institutions that have disproportionately shaped the modern world.

And if you disagree, you need to demonstrate that this historical responsibility is substantially overstated, there are some very basic questions that need to be answered.

Can we identify a non-Western-owned, non-Western-controlled corporation that has accumulated anything remotely comparable to the global environmental footprint of the major Western industrial and fossil-fuel corporations?

Can we identify a non-Western power that, over the modern industrial era, has been responsible for a comparable share of global resource extraction, industrial pollution, greenhouse-gas emissions, colonial extraction, and the transformation of ecosystems on a planetary scale?

These are empirical questions. They should be answered with evidence rather than simply dismissed.

The same applies to taxation and corporate power. Modern multinational corporations operate across borders, exploit differences between jurisdictions, and frequently structure their affairs in ways that allow them to minimize taxation. 

Much of the architecture of that global economic system was created and consolidated by Western powers. That does not mean that non-Western states or corporations are innocent of exploitation or environmental destruction. They clearly are not. China, India, Russia, the Gulf states, and many other non-Western actors have their own environmental records and have participated in extractive economic systems. 

But acknowledging that does not erase the historical fact that the modern global economic order was overwhelmingly constructed through Western imperial and industrial power.

There is also the question of historical responsibility.

For several centuries, European powers participated directly or indirectly in the enslavement, trafficking, colonization, and economic exploitation of millions of Africans and other peoples. The transatlantic slave trade in particular was not an isolated event conducted by a handful of individuals. 

It was an organized economic system involving states, merchants, financiers, shipping interests, plantation economies, and colonial administrations. Its consequences extended far beyond the period of formal abolition.

I am therefore skeptical when discussions of present-day global inequality begin as though the world simply arrived at its current distribution of wealth and power by accident.

Europe and North America accumulated extraordinary wealth during precisely the centuries in which large parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas were being colonized, exploited, or incorporated into economic systems designed primarily to benefit imperial powers. Industrialization, meanwhile, was accompanied by enormous extraction of coal, oil, minerals, timber, land, and other resources. The environmental consequences are now planetary.

Don't reconfigure my position to create a counter argument to something i'm not implying or saying like stupid ChatGPT, this doesn't mean that that contemporary non-Western governments or societies bear no responsibility for environmental destruction, corruption, poverty, or political repression. They do.

 Nor does it mean that Western societies are uniquely evil or that every Western person is personally responsible for historical crimes committed by states and institutions. That would be an absurd simplification.

The argument is about systems, historical power, and disproportionate responsibility.

Look at the distribution of wealth, infrastructure, energy consumption, technological capacity, and political influence across the world today. In many countries that were colonized, the most developed infrastructure remains concentrated in particular cities and economic enclaves, while enormous populations continue to lack reliable electricity, sanitation, healthcare, transportation, education, and other basic services.

It is therefore difficult to discuss global environmental responsibility without discussing global economic inequality.

A country cannot simply be told, "Do not industrialize; do not exploit your natural resources; do not consume as much energy," after generations of Western countries have already industrialized, accumulated wealth, consumed enormous quantities of resources, and established living standards partly made possible by that historical process.

Political sovereignty.

In many parts of the developing world, governments have not operated in conditions of complete political or economic autonomy. Colonialism was replaced, in many cases, by new forms of economic dependency, geopolitical intervention, military alliances, intelligence operations, debt relationships, foreign investment structures, and support for governments that served external interests.

The specific tools varied enormously from country to country, and it would be intellectually dishonest to reduce every political failure in the Global South to Western intervention. Domestic elites, corruption, authoritarianism, ethnic conflict, institutional failures, and local political choices matter enormously.

But it would be equally dishonest to pretend that Western intervention has been irrelevant.

There is abundant historical evidence of Western powers supporting governments, movements, corporations, and political arrangements because they served strategic or economic interests, even when those arrangements were harmful to the populations concerned.

And this brings me to what I find so striking about the current conversation surrounding artificial intelligence.

For decades, people across the world have been warning about climate change, ecological collapse, nuclear weapons, mass poverty, inequality, resource depletion, and threats to human survival. Those warnings were frequently treated as secondary considerations when they conflicted with economic growth, political power, or strategic interests.

Yet now, as artificial intelligence develops rapidly and begins to pose potential risks to existing institutions and centres of power, there is suddenly enormous urgency surrounding "humanity's future."

Of course, some of that concern is entirely legitimate. AI could create genuine risks for humanity, and those risks deserve serious attention.

But there is a profound irony here.

Why does the prospect of technological systems becoming dangerous produce such an immediate and sophisticated conversation about existential risk when centuries of human activity have already produced existential environmental risks?

Why was humanity's survival apparently less urgent when the victims were disproportionately people living in colonized, impoverished, or politically marginalized societies?

Why has the destruction of ecosystems, the exploitation of labour, the displacement of populations, and the unequal distribution of the planet's resources not generated the same sense of urgency?

And why does concern about AI sometimes appear to become most urgent when technological disruption threatens the existing distribution of economic and geopolitical power?

That is the question I want people to take seriously.

I am not arguing that AI should be ignored. I am arguing that we should examine whose survival has historically been treated as urgent, whose suffering has been normalized, and whose interests have determined what counts as a global emergency.

The conclusion that naturally follows is uncomfortable: 

the sudden intensity of the conversation about humanity's survival is not entirely about humanity in the abstract, it is also about the survival of particular institutions, economic arrangements, geopolitical hierarchies, and concentrations of power.

For centuries, the dominant powers of the modern world had extraordinary opportunities to pursue a different relationship with the planet and with the rest of humanity. Instead, the dominant model became one of transatlantic slave trade for over 400 years, not 1year or even 100 years, over 400 and accurate history records it did not end out of their goodwill or kindness of their souls, as you read there are still sectors of this community calling for a return of Black enslavement.

 They were forced to end slavery as far as i'm concerned when the cost of maintaining the institution overtook the rewards, they were addicted to extraction, accumulation, industrial expansion, and geopolitical control, enormous wealth was concentrated in some parts of the world while environmental degradation, political instability, and poverty were disproportionately experienced elsewhere.

So when those same centres of power now present themselves as guardians of humanity's future, non skepticism is evidence of idiocy or mental retardation, mentally discombobulated, vaccinated and innoculated.

The issue is not whether the West has done everything wrong. It has not. Western societies have also produced extraordinary advances in medicine, science, engineering, democracy, human rights, and environmental protection. Nor is the issue whether non-Western societies are innocent. They are not.

The deeper issue is power and accountability.

If humanity is genuinely going to confront climate change, ecological destruction, artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, resource depletion, and other existential risks, then the conversation cannot simply be about protecting the existing centres of power from new threats.

It has to include the people and societies that have historically borne the costs of the existing global order.

If "human survival" is genuinely the objective, then human survival cannot suddenly become important only when the people who historically possessed the greatest power begin to feel threatened themselves.

That is the contradiction I am pointing to.

The question is not merely, "How do we protect humanity from AI?"

It is also:

Which humanity are we talking about, whose interests define the future, who has historically been allowed to determine the conditions of survival, and will the next technological transformation reproduce those same inequalities—or finally challenge them?