Charles (Charlie) F. Kennel is a plasma physicist and former Associate Administrator of NASA. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and won the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics in 1997. He was the director of Mission to Planet Earth, a program during the Clinton Administration to perform comprehensive observations of our home planet. He was a member and chair of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC). He was also Director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Vice Chancellor of Marine Sciences at the University of California, San Diego, from 1998 to 2006. In January 2014, Kennel became the inaugural visiting research fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), University of Cambridge.
Dear Charlie
What could be achieved if there was a public or nonprofit AI effort with the same scale and level of funding as the current large private efforts? What would be the benefits for society? You have contributed to many different fields but more recently you have focused on planetary level challenges.
Charlie:
We live at a key time for the evolution of life on our planet. I remember the transforming conversation I had with the famed evolutionary biologist, E.O. Wilson, at the time he was awarded the first Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2002. He told me then that the planet is on a path to its sixth mass extinction crisis. All species will be forced to squeeze through an evolutionary bottleneck and the few that get through will comprise the starting condition for an entirely new evolutionary stage.
Beating climate change will be critical yet not sufficient to surviving Wilson’s mass extinction. I am not a biologist, but I am aware that powerful so-called CRISPR techniques for editing DNA are now available. I wonder whether the biological, ecological, and earth sciences could be mobilized to make use of this and similar technologies to modify species and design ecosystems that can live with a human population that is pressing on the planet’s limits to support them. AI could help to evaluate the effects of biological interventions on ecosystems and design cooperative research initiatives.
More broadly, the planetary state created by human actions, the Anthropocene, involves so many interconnected risks that Artificial Intelligence can supplement human intelligence to make human societies and earth’s ecologies sustainable.
We have an opportunity created by the massive volume of data produced by space and ground observing networks at work today; integrating them using AI will increase environmental awareness on a planetary scale.
As we have discussed, we are encouraging researchers at different career stages to share ideas about complex science problems that could benefit from a large-scale AI effort. We found that motivation and recognition could be provided if you and other well-known scientists were willing to talk to people that suggest the best ideas. You would be the judge and decide if any idea is for you deserving of attention. Any scientist selected might receive advice but could also be a potential collaborator. Many ideas will be produced, and society will take notice.
Charlie:
Today’s world is a mosaic of proudly independent countries- large and small; rich and poor; democratic and authoritarian-each jealously guarding its autonomy and religious identity. No wonder nobody really knows how to get them to cooperate on existential issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, and pandemics that do not portend instant mutual destruction. There is no recipe book.
Scientists like to say that whereas politics is cutthroat, science is cooperative. I learned that scientific collaborations can take place even in a politically divided world. I first saw this when I was at the UN’s International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste (Italy) at the height of the Cold War, in the 1960s. This was an age when the US and USSR had fully armed nuclear bombers in the sky 24 hours a day, ready to obliterate each other on short notice. The International Centre was the only place in the world where Soviet and American physicists could work together for an extended period-actually do research together. We were all dreamy theoretical physicists and not hard-nosed experimentalists who make bombs. Finding out how to make the same nuclear reaction that creates hydrogen bomb explosions produce the energy for peaceful aims was something both countries wanted. Besides, it would take some time to put our thoughts-should they prove realistic- into action. When it became clear how technically difficult controlled fusion would be to achieve, governments decided to declassify it, so the first seminar at Trieste could proceed without security restrictions or armed guards. Now, almost sixty years later, I am pleased to report there is optimism that fusion will become available to a world seeking sources of energy for battles against climate change- not against each other.
I learned early on that science provides a common ground for civilized international conversations. In my time, a face-to-face meeting established that common ground in a city, Trieste, that was then on the contested border separating the capitalist and communist worlds. Information technology, which since then has progressed to the point where it is now called artificial intelligence, has transformed the meaning of common ground. The much, much larger truly global collaborations needed to fight climate change or Wilson’s feared mass species extinction will use internet-based social technologies. Nonetheless… something magic happens when you are sensing first hand the intensely human passions of people from another world explaining their altruistic ideas over beer! I guess I am showing my age.
REFERENCES
Kennel, Charles F. "The gathering Anthropocene crisis." The Anthropocene Review 8.1 (2021): 83-95.
Kennel, Charles F. "From the Cold War to Global Warming: A Scientific Odyssey" eScholarship, University of California, 2023 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6pj6c3rf