The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 (22 page)

But it is another difference between the American myth and the AI cautionary tales, this time a difference not in setting but in plot, that is most telling. In both cases, tools come to life, and in both they enact revenge on humans. Yet the modern-day depictions of animated tools emphasise a layer of implication that is not as explicit in the ancient American instance: the tools' animation – their ability to come to life, and thus their ability to enact revenge on their makers – is of humankind's own terrible doing in the overly ambitious (and erroneous) certainty that such creations can be controlled. The tools don't, as is the case in the American myth, just magically awaken. By recurrently incorporating this trope into their narratives, AI cautionary tales draw on another narrative tradition, that of tales of hubris, in which an excess of ambition and arrogance eventually brings about ruin.

As such, AI cautionary tales form a site where the American myth, with its focus on animated tools who seek revenge, unites with the hubris theme of ‘pride that goeth before a fall' to create
an even greater sense of dreadful irony. In our god-like quest to animate that which we have created – in giving life not through breathing into a rib or clay or corn, but through manufacturing intelligence in steel or in a petri dish – we create a haunted shadow of ourselves, a doubling that will rise to become the predator that, lurking just beyond the reach of the light thrown by the campfire, looms in our nightmares. Yet while we sit in cinemas watching in horror as our nightmare plays out in the flickering of light and colour on screen, it seems that we are perfectly able to ignore the calamity that awaits us in the car park, in the shopping centres, in our households.

* * * * *

Recently, our use of tools has created concern about our hubris on a much larger scale than ever before because they have given us the power to destroy not just ourselves, but the entire planet. When, after the Industrial Revolution moved from England to the rest of the world, fossil fuels became the raw material for our tools of choice, few realised that this technological advancement, responsible for bettering the lives of many, would also, as its use increased, do untold damage to the Earth. We have long suspected that our capacity for innovation in the realm of technology has made us special among earthly organisms – a tool-toting chimpanzee is at a far remove from the sophisticated tool use of a human. Yet will we continue this so-called progress, this development and veracious use of tools, until we have reworked the nature from which we sprang to such a degree that we incite its very undoing?

Geological history can no longer be separated from human history; our technological advancement has subjected the Earth to human-induced forces, global warming among them, at least as significant as previous, epoch-defining ones such as ice ages. We have only in the past decades begun to grow aware of the
hubris of this act, and yet, our hubris continues. Clive Hamilton, in his book,
Earth Masters: Playing God with the Climate
, describes some of the geo-engineering projects that are now being considered in order not just that the global system continue without drastic interruption, but also to curtail the future damage that is set to occur as a result of the carbon already emitted into the atmosphere. These tools are supposed to counter our use of planet-damaging ones, so that we might continue to use the latter unimpeded.

They include finding some way to capture our carbon waste and then injecting it, via pipes, into the depths of the ocean, or enhancing the natural process of sending carbon to the deep through fertilising the ocean with iron. There are also chemical solutions such as sprinkling the ocean with lime to reduce its acidity, which would increase the ocean's capacity for absorbing carbon. Another option might be to capture carbon from the air using a machine 10 metres high and one kilometre long; to offset its emissions, one standard coal-fired plant would need 30 of these, as well as six chemical plants, not to mention infrastructure to transport and bury the waste underground.

Geo-engineering is nothing if not an ambitious use of tools. Yet, through our art, we seem to be trying to tell ourselves that ambitious tool use is inextricably linked with the dangers of hubris. The tool, our art throughout the ages tells us – that evolutionary ally, those technologies that prolong our lives and make them easier, raising us to a privileged position among animals – led to our forebears', and will lead to our descendants', downfall. If we were to apply this lesson to the present, we might wonder if the tools we envisage as key to the survival of our current global system, given the scale of what they might try to achieve, could prove to lead to our own.

It remains to be seen whether our historical unease about our evolutionary ally will inspire us to such action as, for example,
taking measures to halt this ally's continued, harmful advance. Back in 1972, Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William W. Behrens III, in their book
Limits to Growth
, predicted an overshoot and collapse of the global industrial system in the mid-to-late 21st century. They argued that this system had so much inertia that it would be unable to correct its course in response to planetary stress.

Will we really prove so stupid? Or will be able to, as in Kubrick's film, sever our alliance with tools?

Humanity has never before been required, as a whole, to curb our tool use. But maybe we can start to believe that our anxiety around tools exists for a reason. Maybe we can even go so far as to harness this long-held unease about tools to override our love affair with the convenience they grant us. And maybe, in so doing, we can pare back our use of them enough to mitigate future damage to our planet.

As for the Moche's preoccupation with tools, it was, in the end, unfounded, at least as regards their own society. Their civilisation collapsed because of something that was at that time utterly unrelated, something they could not control: climate change. It was recorded all over the world, in the Gaelic Irish Annals, for example, and in the Byzantine historian Procopius' report on the wars with the Vandals, and was probably caused by a major volcanic eruption. For the Moche, it meant 30 years of flooding followed by 30 years of drought. If we were living at other times, this cause of their collapse might have made the Moche's anxiety about their tools seem quaint and, ultimately, misguided. But given that today's climate change is inextricably linked with and affected by our tool use, their anxiety and their fate tell a different story.

Global ‘roadmap' shows where to put roads without costing the earth

Messages from Mungo

How dust affects climate, health and … everything

Aliens versus predators:
The toxic toad invasion

Michael Slezak

As I drive along the highway from Darwin, through a town called Humpty Doo, it's hard to believe I'm in cane toad territory. It's a scorching 42 °C and the tropical savannah alongside the road is bone dry, a patchwork of fire scars, red dirt and brown leaves. It is the end of the dry season, and there has been no rain to speak of for more than three months. This isn't the kind of place you would expect to find water-loving amphibians from the Amazon – not even killer supertoads – but they are here.

I'm heading to a nearby wildlife reserve called Fogg Dam to visit biologist Rick Shine. After spending decades studying native water pythons, Shine switched his focus to cane toads as they neared Fogg Dam a decade ago. ‘It was an obvious opportunity to work out what the impact would be,' he says as he shows me around his lab – an old brick building connected to a couple of large sheds. All around are small pools, cages and even ice cream containers full of toads of various ages.

As the toads invaded Fogg Dam, Shine, who is based at the University of Sydney, got some of the first hard data on their impact. What he has found is that the Australian cane toad
invasion is both far worse than anyone thought – and also not nearly as bad.

The toads are spreading further and faster than anyone expected, and they do have a devastating impact when they first arrive in a region. But most animals are adapting to their presence surprisingly quickly, and some even benefit. ‘If you're a frog, the toad is your superhero,' says Shine. ‘You've got its picture up on the wall. This guy is coming in, he looks like a frog and is killing everything that attacks frogs. If you're a green tree frog, what more could you hope for in life?'

So while many biologists still fear that the toads will have dire consequences, Shine is more optimistic. ‘I came into this thinking “I'm going to be documenting a catastrophe”,' he says. ‘I've gone to thinking it's a good-news story about the resilience of ecosystems.' Could he really be right?

The toad invasion began in 1935 when 102 young cane toads were brought to Queensland from Hawaii. At the time, the toads, native to South America, were being deliberately introduced to many sugar-cane growing regions across the tropics to control pests – despite there being little evidence that the ground-living toads could control pests on 3-metre-high sugarcanes. They have thrived in most of their new homes.

In Australia, the toads got little attention for decades, even as they slowly spread and multiplied. But then a pet quoll – a small carnivorous marsupial native to Australia – belonging to Mike Archer died after trying to eat a toad. Stung by denials that the toads were toxic to native wildlife, Archer, a palaeontologist at the University of New South Wales, went around collecting reports of pet dogs and native predators dying after trying to eat the toads. His 1975 paper alerted people to the potential impacts. ‘That was the turning point where we really started to say to zoologists that this is a disaster,' says Archer.

No one doubts any longer that cane toads are killers. Not
only do they eat any animal they can stuff in their mouths, they also produce toxins in their skin that, when absorbed through the mouth or eyes, can stop the heart. Most animals that try to eat them die – which is very bad news given that the toad army now numbers in the hundreds of millions, and in places there are more than 2000 toads per hectare.

These factors led many biologists to predict ecological meltdown. ‘You can now forget about Kakadu,' biologist Mike Tyler of Adelaide University was reported as saying, as the toads moved into the world heritage site Kakadu National Park near Darwin. ‘Kakadu is lost.'

The toads are now racing towards a region of north-western Australia known as the Kimberley. ‘Many very distinctive Australian native species now only occur there,' Shine says. Cats, fungi, habitat loss and other pressures have wiped them out elsewhere. ‘So the Kimberley really is the last hold-out for the things that are in desperate trouble.'

No one expected the toads to move so fast. Initially, they only advanced about 10 kilometres per year. Now they are moving more than 55 kilometres per year. In 2009 they crossed into Western Australia, more than 4000 kilometres from where they began.

When Shine's team strapped radio trackers on the toads as they moved past Fogg Dam and into Darwin between 2001 and 2005, they found the invasion front was averaging an incredible 250 metres every night. Individual toads sometimes went much faster. One of the toads they tracked travelled almost 22 kilometres in a single month.

The docile, fat toads Shine knew from the farms of Queensland simply couldn't do that, he thought. So he examined the toads on the front line and found something remarkable. In just a few decades, they had evolved longer legs that allow them to move faster.

To prove we are witnessing evolution in action, Shine bred
toads from different locations in captivity and compared their progeny. Lo and behold, the long legs were passed on to their offspring.

The leaders of the invasion seem to be evolving in even more radical ways. When you put the toads in a cage ‘the guys from Queensland sit back, you know, [saying] “Bring me another cockroach please”,' Shine says. ‘But when you get the toads from the invasion front, the poor buggers are bashing their noses against the wall,' he says, punching his palm repeatedly with his fist to demonstrate. ‘They want to get going.'

Shine's PhD student Jodie Gruber is trying to find out if they are getting smarter too. Gruber can't answer that question yet, she tells me when I go to visit, but she has already discovered that the toads are smart. Only one amphibian had ever passed a test called the Morris water maze, in which it had to find an underwater platform to sit on, she says. After just a week of studying the toads, she has found that they can pass the test too.

So the vanguard toads are evolving to be faster, more aggressive and possibly smarter. They do pay a price for these abilities, though, such as arthritis and a weaker immune system. So once an area has been invaded, the population regresses back to the lazy Queensland-type toads. But in the meantime, Australia has to deal with an accelerating wave of invaders. How can Shine be optimistic? Because what happened at Fogg Dam and elsewhere wasn't as bad as he had feared.