50,000+ views, readers from more than 150 countries and several years later, I’m pleased to report that The Frightened Face of Nature daily readership continues to grow.
Perhaps that’s not surprising. Wherever we live, many of us share a concern for the natural world and the pressures it faces.
Nature is under pressure almost everywhere. Habitat loss, intensive farming, pollution, climate change, and our tendency to treat natural capital as something abundant rather than precious have all played their part. We can debate the causes long into the night, but nature has been forced to adapt to them all.
The difficulty is often the speed of change.
When populations decline, we are seeing the friction between change and adaptation.
Some would call it progress. Others might describe it as the reverse of evolution. I find it worrying.
We’re certainly not the first generation to notice these losses. This blog was originally created to share the life and work of Maxwell Knight, a lifelong amateur naturalist who also happened to be one of Britain’s most successful spymasters during the inter-war years.
Over time, the blog led to several other projects. Recently, I’ve realised that my main writing project, although focused on Artificial Intelligence, has been exploring a very similar question.
For years, I’ve written about whether nature can adapt quickly enough to the changes we are creating around it. Now we find ourselves facing our own period of rapid adaptation.
Artificial Intelligence will touch almost every part of society. Whether we welcome that, resist it, or sit somewhere between the two, each of us will need to decide how we respond to it and what place we want it to occupy in our lives. All of that said, whatever we decide, it could be out of our hands.
Today, many people use AI in three broad ways: automation, augmentation and agency.
Automation is the process of using AI to complete a task.
Augmentation is working alongside AI to extend our capabilities.
Agency is allowing AI to act on our behalf towards goals we have set.
My current book explores how these changes may influence our relationships with our children and grandchildren when the next source of advice, information or reassurance is increasingly machine-based. That may sound unlikely. Yet surveys suggest that around a third of child AI users already consider AI to be a friend.
This blog has generally asked…
Can nature adapt quickly enough to change?
And now, perhaps:
Can we?
You can find out more about my forthcoming book here: https://simonhking.co.uk/
Thank you,
Simon
