The Storm of Progress: Climate Change, Ai, and the Roots of Our Dangerous Ethical Myopia

In a time of existential threats from climate change, computer-based superintelligences, AI-accelerated nuclear and biological warfare and more, we can no longer avoid some profound questions about what's going on.

Why is it that what we've been taught to celebrate as progress, as modern history's greatest social and technical achievements, are now threatening our very existence?

Author Wade Rowland writes that the worst of these global crises are the fruits of a basic error made by well-intentioned Enlightenment thinkers at the dawn of the scientific revolution: a misunderstanding of the essence of humanity. In assuming the worst about human nature and fashioning a civilization based on those false assumptions, some of early modern philosophy's most revered thinkers set us on a dangerous path.

Rowland argues that by better understanding human nature in the light of current scientific and philosophical knowledge, we can better—and we can do better.

Because we have what it takes—because we are good.

Ranked among Canada's leading literary journalists, Wade Rowland is the author of more than a dozen non- fiction books including Ockham's Razor, Greed, Inc., and Saving the CBC. As a journalist he has spent many years in television news production at the network level and has held senior management roles at both CTV and CBC, where he was also senior producer of the consumer affairs program Marketplace. Rowland was Maclean Hunter Chair of Ethics in Media at Ryerson University from 2001-2003. He earned an MA in the philosophy of science from Trent University in 2003. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture and is currently an Associate Professor in York University's Department of Communication Studies. Born in Montreal, Wade Rowland grew up in Regina and Winnipeg and currently lives in rural Port Hope, Ontario, with his wife Christine Collie Rowland.