A matter of scale

The main reason Trump was elected was the desperation felt by a sizable sector of the American working and middle classes who have already been hammered by globalization or fear they soon will be. Trump's election to power signifies both the fear of collapse and an eagerness for deeper change in this sector. They do not wish to feel any greater effects of what they see as a socio-political storm that stands to threaten their economic viability and they want a reaffirmation of their deeper moral values.

Certainly this sentiment was helped by the bankruptcy of the globalist technocratic elite who dominated the Democrat Party (so clearly manifest in the Clintons) but Trump's whole program was aimed at the growing fears of those losing out to globalization. The response was presented as a nationalist 'America First' concept.

Consequently, Trump has been threatening free trade at various levels, he has trashed any concerted effort to deal with global warming (such as the Paris agreement), and he has reasserted US military adventurism, even in space. Of course this approach will end in tears, but he will likely set back any attempt to consolidate governance at the global level for decades. Even the immediate costs are potentially catastrophic: there is a strong chance of a miscalculated nuclear exchange, and even more worrying, a squandering of the time needed to prevent runaway global warming. Ironically, Trump's desperate focus on the bottom line is costing a tremendous figure that is growing in correlation with this destruction of progressive ideology, free trade and climate change acknowledgement.

The phase of economic globalization that begun in the early 1980s has done exactly what the very rich wanted: it extended mass-industrial capitalism around the world and increased the amount of profit accrued by the wealthiest. But it also exacerbated environmental damage and heavily influenced the rise of certain nations (China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, etc) for whom maintaining national integrity, not maximum profits, is the priority. Survival in increasingly difficult times is their main concern, either to provide for (and control) huge populations as in the case of China and India, or to maintain specific forms of national development in the case of Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The unilateralist Trump program may force at least some of them to cooperate more, but the absence of the US from global cooperation in other ways presents huge problems for the continuation of a global scale civilization on Earth.

Even if the Trump experiment is curtailed early, it is doubtful that enough time will remain for viable solutions to arise to deal with global problems. Good will and hard work by the international administrative class can defuse the nuclear arms threat and stabilize the world economy to a degree, but global warming is already underway and approaching criticality.

In addition the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI), in both information processing capability and in the form of versatile robots, throws another potent ingredient into the mix. In fact AI may be the solution to the world's environmental problems with an age of hyper-efficient management of just about everything, but the cost may be the end of what we think is meaningful about being human, like individual autonomy. In any case, this issue is, as yet, just too dynamic to be understood in any useful way. A reliance on artificial intelligence to fix our environmental problems would be is a risky one, as we do not understand the process and implications for doing so, nor will we likely comprehend this as we require such immense processing power to be utilised in order to create a solution. At this stage, such a hope for this application of AI is not comprehendible or useful without the technological advancements. Despite the warnings of some eminently smart people like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, as things stand we are still just going along for the ride as the pace of research in AI only accelerates.

Throughout history major transformations in the levels of scale and complexity in which human beings organize their various activities on Earth have always been fraught with danger. The rise of warlike city states in ancient Mesopotamia; the fall of the Roman Empire; the failure of Chinese maritime expansion and the success of European efforts in the fifteenth century; the rise of the British Empire and the development of North America after the sixteenth century; the spread of European colonization; two world wars and then global Cold War and economic globalization have all presented great opportunities for development but also great disruption and hardship for the affected populations. Each shift in scale involved new technologies and ways of organizing.

The problem of global warming represents the rise of global scale environmental issues. Essentially, there is now not enough water and atmosphere to suck up the greenhouse gases created by mass-industrial society. Similarly, the imminent arrival of general AI is, like the Internet, the result of attempts to control human activities at a global scale through better communications and information processing systems. So far the main application of the most capable (albeit still limited) AI systems has been in big science, high finance, corporate operations and global military activity, the most developed global scale arrangements we know. Soon enough an AI system smarter than humans will arrive and robots will become ubiquitous in the workplace, and just about everywhere else.

We have been living with global scale transportation, communications, trade and culture for decades at least. Human beings on Earth already live in large part as a global species but without some core organizational arrangements in place, and now things are about to get a lot more complicated.

In particular we have minimal global institutions in terms of politics and law, and into the vacuum created by this lack of effective control Trumpism (a proto-fascist hyper nationalism) has inserted itself, a process repeated in Europe, the Philippines and elsewhere. As national political systems fail (consisting mostly of functional relations between the main political parties), the extremes become viable. Of course this approach can't work (right wing reactionaryism, in particular, has already been tried and failed miserably) but it can muddy the waters for a while. As such it will use up time we just don't have to spare that is needed to urgently deal with basic structural problems.