climate threats as a testbed for new AI to cope with pervasive fake news

People have asked: Why should we feel any need for any change in corporate management laws, structures and culture, even as new IT

is about to change it all not just with local apps but with the overall system and its metrics?

I don't believe that climate change is the number one threat to human life, or that the changes should all be about climate change,but it IDS part of the picture, and it is a beautifully clear example of the LIMITATIONS of today's information networks. If we want to think realistically about how to design (more intelligent) information networks, it is good engineering practice to think in realistic concrete terms about how the present networks are screwing up.

And so, here is an example which haunts me. A top engineer made some comments about climate change which I replied to as follows:

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When climate was the main part of my job (working for Senator Specter in 2009, on loan from NSF),I was amazed to have close contact BOTH to:

(1) the folks funded by the oil and gas lobbyists pushing hard to tell us that warming of the poles is a myth;

(2) the planners for the oil industry, putting billions into new efforts to take advantage of the huge opportunities of the ice-free Arctic coming soon,

asking for billions in policy support to make sure WE get the good stuff before our competitors do.

That reminds me somehow of a hearing where people asked for support to sequester CO2 by piping it at high pressure into chambers deep in the ground. "This is absolutely safe; we have proven it," When asked what they need most:"We need federal guarantees that the government will bear the cost when it escapes and explodes." (There are better ways to handle CO2, but there was more money in lobbies trying to extract more money from the taxpayer.)

As for all those fires raging out of control in the Amazon, are they just a sign that Bolsonaro is an obnoxious person with evil capitalist policies? Even if that is PART of the story, is it really the whole thing? Proudly correct people have told me that it is,  but then came Bolivia. And then, somehow missed by our press, is the story of unprecedented new fires across Siberia, more serious than the ones which DID get world shock and press about ten years ago. Could it be that it is a secret cabal of Putin, Bolsonaro and Morales, as the current spirit of  thought seems to suggest? Or could it be that we actually live on planet earth?

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In a different discussion, a more visionary engineer pointed me to some important news on the science side:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/priyashukla/2019/08/31/scientists-may-have-discovered-what-caused-one-of-the-planets-worst-extinctions/#74e0b1a63c7c

That represents real progress on the basic science side, reinforcing what I summarized in my vimeo interview about the coming H2S threat, for which we have maps from NOAA from actual data. 

But again, this is just an example. My PhD thesis advisor once wrote a famous book, the Nerves of Government, and I ask: how can we really design neural networks that actually lead to availability of some real information, for situations like this an others? The "fake news" problem is not about hiring censors repressing independent thought, or about Russia interfering with our elections; those are just symptoms of a more fundamental unsolved design problem. 

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