Luis I. Prádanos

We are an environmental humanities researcher and an AI scholar. When we asked ChatGPT if AI systems can help address the environmental crisis, the response unsurprisingly was optimistic. We had reasons not to trust it. Chatbots are not designed for veracity, but for guessing what the answer to a prompt would be based on content that has been previously written by others (humans and machines). The answers tend to favor the most popular, not necessarily the most critical, content.

Our current predicament demands an alternative design paradigm that envisions its infrastructures as if we were 8 billion humans living in an overstressed finite planet—because we are.

I believe that higher education would better serve students in particular and all humans in general if our teaching and research methods stop perpetuating the cultural paradigm that brought us to the brink of extinction and start encouraging students to imagine and create alternatives to it.