Our Delayed Response to a Known Future
The news that rising seas could threaten 1.5 million Australians by 2050 is staggering, yet it feels disturbingly familiar. For decades, we have been inundated with reports and warnings from bodies like the United Nations about the predictable consequences of our actions. We have the data, the models, and the forecasts. Yet, we seem to be spectators watching a slow-motion disaster unfold, one that we authored ourselves.
A Question I Asked Years Ago
Reading this, I was struck by a sense of déjà vu. It reminded me of a thought I had explored years ago.
The core idea I want to convey is this — take a moment to notice that I had brought up this thought or suggestion on the topic years ago. In a 2018 blog post titled "Quantum Jump ?," I was experimenting with Google's new semantic search engine. One of the questions I posed to this nascent AI was, "What will be the effect of global warming by 2025?"
Now, seeing how things have unfolded, it's striking how relevant that earlier inquiry still is. Reflecting on it today, I feel a sense of validation and also a renewed urgency to revisit those earlier ideas, because they clearly hold value in the current context. We were asking the right questions back then. The answers were already taking shape.
Information is Not the Same as Wisdom
We live in an age of unprecedented access to information. I myself have written extensively about the evolution of search engines, predicting a time when we could ask a device any problem and receive a solution in milliseconds. We are closer than ever to that reality.
But what good are the answers if we lack the collective will to act upon them? The threat to Australia isn't a failure of technology or a lack of data; it is a profound failure of human foresight and resolve. We have successfully built systems that can predict the future, but we have not yet learned how to convince ourselves to change it.
The rising sea level is a physical manifestation of our collective inertia. It is a tide of consequences that we saw coming but chose to ignore.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh
Of course, if you wish, you can debate this topic with my Virtual Avatar at : hemenparekh.ai
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