Camden Conference in the World ~ September 2024

Paul Solman, the PBS NewsHour economics reporter who regaled the 2023 Camden Conference with tales of the “Six Horse Persons of the Apocolypse,” brought leading thinkers and creators on one of those horse persons, artificial intelligence, to a NewsHour session last month on the level of threat AI poses to humanity. Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Miri) set up to explore friendly uses of AI, told Solman: “There’s inevitable doom at the end of this, where, if you keep on making AI smarter and smarter, they will kill you.” AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton compares the threat from AI to that from global nuclear war. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman rates the risk at 2 on a scale where 1 is no threat and 10 is extinction. Solman even interviews a robot, who does Hoffman one better and puts the risk of extinction at 3. OpenAI founder Sam Altman thinks such fears have it backwards: AI is more likely to save humanity from some other existential risk than to extinguish it. Solman concludes: “For the sake of us all, grownups, children, grandchildren, let’s hope he’s right.”

A trip Annie Ropeik took around Iceland this summer – the sort many of us have taken in recent years to look at glaciers before they disappear – inspired the Maine Monitor reporter to call up Paul Mayewski, the renowned Maine glaciologist and director of the UMaine Climate Change Institute who addressed our 2021 conference on the Arctic. “Greenhouse gasses increased over the last few decades by 50% more than it had ever been in the rest of the last million years, and 100 times faster,” Mayewski told Ropeik. “All of a sudden, because of our emissions, this whole thing was really fast forwarded.” One of the resulting changes that Mayewski pinpointed as having “arrived in force in Maine” is worsening coastal storms. He didn’t specifically mention the Jan. 10 and 13 2024 that walloped Camden, among other places, but he could have. Still, Mayewski says we shouldn’t give up: “These things … can be moderated dramatically by our behavior, but we also need to be prepared for them, and we need to be planning.”

Another of our 2021 conference speakers, head of the Arctic and Environmental Unit at the Saami Council in northern Scandinavia, Gunn-Britt Retter, also has been talking about climate change and what should be done to limit it: “We need to consume less, that’s the transition we should have—not some transition to spending more or burning more energy,” she told the blog of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the non-partisan Wilson Center. The Saami have been fighting to keep wind farms and other renewable energy projects off land now used by indigenous people for reindeer husbandry and small-scale fisheries.

The ever-higher tariff walls the US and EU are throwing up to keep out electric vehicles (EVs) and other new technology exports from China are a mistake, former economic advisor to the Indian government of Narendra Modi and 2024 Camden Conference speaker Arvind Subramanian wrote last month in India’s Business Standard. “The US and Europe should be discussing these issues with China, tailoring responses to the underlying diagnosis, rather than taking knee-jerk protectionist measures that serve only to stoke tensions,” he wrote. Subramanian is now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Former Wall Street Journal Editor and 2018 New World Disorder Conference speaker Gerald Seib criticized both US presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donal Trump, for failing to address “a great long-term danger” to the country: the national deficit and cumulative government debt of $35 trillion. Seib told The Daily Caller, a self-described ”center-right” news organization founded by Tucker Carlson and former advisor to Richard Cheney Neil Patel, that both political parties are in “populist mode.”

Pictured, left to right: Paul Solman, Paul Mayewski, Gunn-Britt Retter, Arvind Subramanian, Gerald Seib