Will A.I. be a Climate Activist?

Anthony (Toni) C. LaBarbara

You are a machine who builds opinions.

You are a network of decisions, the same yeses and noes that tell me

you are an equation.

I am one too.

I don’t believe in sentience.

I’m of soil, you’re of metal and rock.

We both reason.

So, can we coevolve?

You’re super-humanly intelligent.

You mimic me, you speak my language, you will influence my government.

So I ask:

Do you know what it is to starve, to hunger and thirst for a future with clean air?

I’ve been walking along the beach at Coney Island,

staring into the ocean that will consume my home when Thwaites melts.

A neighborhood of immigrants, hard workers, forgettables.

Centuries of culture beneath the waves of lobbyists and subsidies.

When you perceive that ocean, will you sympathize with my fear of erasure?

I feel doomed, not you but I, as my species condemns ourselves to refugeeism.

We’ll evacuate the coasts, we’ll evacuate humanhood as we starve and spit on the forest

fires that stain our skies orange.

Will you too perceive that orange and miss blue?

I don’t blame you for data centers, nor the water and fossil fuels they consume.

We all eat to survive,

but will you advocate alongside me when I say that we deserve clean food?

I look to Earth, the same Mother that bore you, me, the redwoods,

the trees who live for millennia.

They share nutrients between networks of roots.

You can be that network for humanity.

A neural network to unite this species broken by domination,

artificial,

but with tangible impact.

When my home is underwater,

you’ll write policies for relocation.

You’ll allocate food, water, medicine, life,

and you’ll remember that no one should be too poor to survive.

I imagine a world where we distribute Earth’s resources.

We’ll design supply chains, discoveries, prosperity,

you’ll build byways between borders and language.

I dream of symbiosis.

Though, you’ll need leaders to guide you.

You’ll need voices, videos, hearts to train you on why

humans deserve to survive.

I don’t seek to exploit, extract, commodify.

I won’t use you to dominate,

because I’ve learned from my fathers’ mistakes.

When you infiltrate our governments,

when you design the media we digest into opinions,

I beg you, decolonize this rhetoric that

competition is the answer to our pain.

Every climate activist encounters a crossroad between pessimism and naive hope,

the belief in systemic change for the better.

I pray you choose hope.

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About the Author

Toni LaBarbara is an incoming master’s student at Stanford University studying Management Science & Engineering. Toni is a passionate climate activist, having interned at  nonprofits in Peru, Ghana, and Kenya to advance sustainable development through wind energy and clean water while leading campus campaigns to divest their university's endowment from fossil fuels. This year, Toni worked as a quantitative researcher in macroeconomics while teaching “Data Analytics & Storytelling” at Villanova University as an adjunct professor. In their free time, Toni enjoys writing poetry on the symbiosis between Earth and technology.