AI or Climate Crisis: Will One of Them End Humanity?

TVS News AI redaktionell betreut präsentiert KI oder Klimakrise: Wird eine davon das Menschsein beenden.

A summer of extreme heat, destroyed villages in Nepal and a record super El Niño form, according to Adam McKay and Philip Eubanks, the dramatic backdrop to a dual threat: the climate crisis and the risk posed by artificial intelligence. In their Guardian commentary, they ask whether one of them could end human existence – and give a shared answer: We can prevent both.

The text therefore addresses not only people who already fear an AI breakthrough or climate change. It provides an explanation for why both risks are so difficult to slow down: not just the technology or the climate is decisive, but the companies and structures behind them.

The authors connect the two subjects through a common core. Their argument is that AI and the climate crisis have similar roots: private entities that want to profit from the threat. Resistance to this development is possible, provided society does not surrender its power.

Why the climate crisis alone is not the whole explanation

For McKay and Eubanks, the climate crisis is not merely a natural disaster, but a societal challenge. The consequences cited in their commentary – including extreme heat, destroyed villages in Nepal and a record super El Niño – show, in their portrayal, how immediate the dangers are.

The commentary's message, however, is not a simple assignment of blame to individual people. It shifts the focus to economic incentives: when actors can profit from crises, uncertainty or costly consequences, pressure arises to perpetuate those dangers. This brings the question of who sets the rules and who enforces them to the center.

The AI threat follows the same pattern

McKay and Eubanks add the possibility of AI-driven extinction to the climate risk. Here, too, their argument does not rest on a single invention or company, but on the relationship between private profit and public responsibility.

Both dangers therefore cannot be resolved through mere appeals to individual users. Instead, economic structures would need to be changed so that private companies no longer profit from the threat or amplify it for their own purposes.

Shared causes require shared counterpower

The commentary's central thesis is: We have the power to stand up against both threats. This is deliberately framed in optimistic terms. At the same time, the analysis makes clear that exercising that power cannot be treated as a secondary task if the underlying incentives remain unchanged.

McKay and Eubanks do not provide a detailed action plan or a concrete examination of individual technical or political proposals in this Guardian commentary. Their contribution is instead a pointed diagnosis: AI and the climate crisis share an economic cause. According to the authors, anyone who understands that cause can see why both crises must be fought together.

The climate crisis and extinction through AI may appear to be two completely different scenarios. In this commentary, they become a related problem: humanity's fate is determined not only by inventions or natural forces, but by the rules it creates for private power.