A livable future is possible if we unite against climate change and the nuclear threat before the world self-immolates, Noam Chomsky** asserts. That's the stark either-or underlying many of the interviews in this newly published volume (Haymarket Books, 2024), conducted by C. J. Polychroniou of Truthout.org. This is the fourth volume comprising such interviews of this world's greatest living public intellectual and most cited living scholar. Some of the interviews in this volume include the economist and environmental expert Robert Pollin. Most were previously published by Truthout.
The interviews encompass the years 2022 and 2023, in reverse order, encompassing global crises such as climate change, the consequences of the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the rising nuclear risk, while exploring at the same time neo-fascism here and abroad and the harm already done by global warming and Biden's foreign policy, arming Ukraine and Israel with dangerous weaponry.
"Optimism over despair" has always been one of Noam Chomsky's mottos, and thus he contends that humanity can avert a climate catastrophe and a nuclear holocaust, the two looming existential threats to the continued existence of the world we have created and are now destroying-- the two most important issues in world history."
The destructiveness of climate change is our "exuberant race to destruction "Marx's exuberant script of capitalism gone berserk."
How can we possibly make a difference at this point? "The distribution of power can be changed by an aroused public with its own very different priorities. The current masters can be controlled on a path toward elimination of their illegitimate authority. The rules of the game can be changed, in the short term modified sufficiently to enable humankind to adopt the means that have been spelled out in detail to step back from the abyss-- The alternatives are too grim to contemplate."
However, this optimism, such as it is, which appears more than once among the interviews, seems quixotic given Chomsky's judgment that "[W]e may be on the verge of the dawn of an anti-Enlightenment era, with capitalism and irrationality having gone berserk."
Before descending into world affairs, the interviews' chief focus, we must all want to know this most-quoted public intellectual's take on the future of AI. In a word, he says that "the genie is out of the bottle." In other words, AI has been shown already to surpass human performance-- to take one example, in a game of chess. In fact, "there is no Great Chain of Being with humans at the top." For years, calculators have far exceeded our relevant capabilities. Even desert ants "far exceed human navigational capacities," as do sea turtles and birds, who can migrate thousands of miles from a given point and then return to the exact place. Some aboriginal tribes among the Polynesians use wind, currents, and stars to navigate--techniques still beyond others' understanding. These skills are also topics of research.
Language acquisition and thought among humans, though, are unique among species. Production of language "involve[es] properties that remain as mysterious to us today as when they were regarded with awe and amazement by Galileo and his contemporaries at the dawn of modern science-- we still for the most part lack understanding of [t]he internal processes that are the core objects into the nature of language, its acquisition, and use." Obstructing research are "corporate campaigns to encourage disdain for science-- first of all those whose products are murderous-- and profitable to them [--among them many neo-fascists]. Right now such processes are leading to destruction of human life worldwide."
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