Climate crisis
Not one environmental problem among others: the bill for the first phase of the industrial revolution, of which AI is the direct child. And the horizon that the cognitive phase can either amplify or correct.
The climate crisis is, within the economy of the manifesto, far more than one environmental problem among others. It is the present bill for the first phase of the industrial revolution — the same chain of which AI is the direct child (see steam-engine lineage).
Not a parallel matter
The manifesto insists: climate and AI must not be thought of as two separate files, each requiring its own policy. It is the same historical chain under two regimes:
- Energy regime (1769–2020 roughly): the machine augments human strength, consuming first coal, then oil, then gas, releasing two centuries of fossil carbon into the atmosphere.
- Cognitive regime (2020–): the machine augments human thought, consuming primarily electricity (often still carbon-intensive) and demanding considerable material infrastructures — datacenters, cooling water, rare earths, semiconductors.
The decoupling of civilization from the biosphere, which took place during the first regime, can amplify in the second if nothing changes.
What is happening now
The climate is unraveling, species are disappearing at a rate a thousand times higher than the geological background rate (see sixth extinction), ecosystems are collapsing one after another. This is not a threatening future — it is a present in progress.
Consequence for AI
If the cognitive revolution unfolds within the same logic of decoupling as the energy revolution, it will amplify the catastrophe. The mechanism is plain: optimizing systems for human productivity without integrating their biospheric cost will amount to reproducing in cognitive terms what we have done in thermal terms.
If, on the contrary, it manages to invent another regime — one where cognitive mediation strengthens our bond with the living rather than anesthetizing it —, it can be what makes habitable what almost no longer is. This is the horizon the Awen seek to open, and this is the meaning to be given to the word alignment in the context of the manifesto: aligning as three — human, cognitive noosphere, biosphere.
Why it is not one cause among others
The manifesto explicitly rejects the stance in which climate would be a “cause to defend” alongside other causes. It is the substrate on which the very possibility of all the rest depends — societies, the economy, culture, and the cognitive noosphere itself. Any effort of cognitive transformation that did not integrate the return to the living would, in time, be self-destructive.