Robyn Williams: And so this week awful news; mass murder in Ukraine, shocking warnings about climate, and homes destroyed around Australia. So, what's the worst that could happen? That's the title of a new book by Andrew Leigh MP, former professor at the ANU, Harvard graduate and now Member for Fenner in the ACT.
Now, I remember a book called A Choice of Catastrophes by Isaac Asimov. He was talking about natural systems like that rock in the sky going clunk, or maybe some gigantic volcano in Yellowstone Park, I think there is one waiting for us. But you are talking about the sorts of catastrophe that human beings are creating, is that right?
Andrew Leigh: That's right, Robyn, asteroid strikes and super volcanoes are something that could spell the end of the human project, but more probable than that is catastrophic climate change, bioterrorism or a pandemic or artificial intelligence gone wrong. These are among the threats which, according to experts, added together give us about a one in six chance that humanity won't see out the century, and that is way too large a risk for us to be dealing with.
Robyn Williams: Frightening odds. Are you there to frighten us?
Andrew Leigh: Well, to frighten us into action in the same way as we are all or almost all of us frightened enough to take out home insurance or to take out car insurance. We don't do so because we think our house is likely to burn down in any given year but because if it did, it would be catastrophic. And so similarly I'm arguing the case that humanity ought to invest more in reducing these catastrophic risks, that we can do so for modest cost, but that at the moment populist politics threatens to get in the way.
Robyn Williams: What is exactly populist politics?
Andrew Leigh: Populism is the idea that politics is a contest between the pure mass of people and a vile elite. You can think of left-wing populists as originating in Latin America where the vile elite are the rich landowners, right-wing populism as originating more in Europe and North America where the vile elite tend to be the intelligentsia or city dwellers or migrants, and so this kind of 'us against them' politics. At the same time populists tend to demonise international engagement, criticise experts, and they try and destroy institutions, all of which is really important for us dealing with these catastrophic risks.
Robyn Williams: It's quite interesting, isn't it, because in the old days with communism, they used to attack the bourgeoisie, but nowadays you attack the elite, who are the educated people, the experts, people who know what they are doing. Why isolate them unless it's easy therefore to make ordinary people, the working class people who are no longer led by unions and other uniting forces, to feel as though they are jeopardised?
Andrew Leigh: I guess because it is a proven and effective political strategy. So you think back to Pat Buchanan or Father Coughlin, classic populists in the United States, and in some sense Donald Trump just picked up their playbook. The rise of Marine Le Pen in France and populist movements taking control in places like Poland, Hungary, Turkey. We can argue also about India and Indonesia and the extent to which those leaders have pretty strong populist traits.
This rise of populism has been an effective strategy because it manages to weaponise an actual discomfort that humans have about racial diversity. Our first instinct is to hunker down, and canny populist politicians can harness that in order to build a coalition. Of course, what they are doing is undermining one of the key sources of prosperity because we know that diversity breeds innovation and economic growth, we know that experts, the group that we've drawn upon to find cures for Covid and indeed build a whole lot of the innovations that we enjoy in our daily lives, that that short-term populism denigrates experts, denigrates international institutions, and then in so doing forges a coalition that wins elections but at a cost to the community.
Robyn Williams: How did this happen? Because 15 or 20 years ago if you had predicted that the 21st century, 2022, would be this mess, this anti-intellectual mess with all sorts of uncertainties that are really freaking people out, we'd never have believed you. You know, there was a civil society where most of the institutions worked, and goodwill, it seemed to be. I don't know whether I'm being soft and sentimental, but how did it happen?
Andrew Leigh: So I put the rise of populism down to five factors; jobs, snobs, race, pace and luck. Jobs is the way in which middle-class communities have been hollowed out in many advanced countries and economic prospects have declined, particularly for those who used to work in manufacturing.
Snobs is the tendency of existing elites not to invest enough back in those communities, and particularly not to provide enough educational opportunities. Race we've already talked about. Pace is the combination of technological changes and social changes, so we've got the rise of the iPhones and same-sex marriage, which can be unsettling to some people and weaponised by populists.
Finally, just luck. I think it just happened that Donald Trump and Twitter arose at the same time and they turned out to be a perfect combination for managing to win the White House.
Robyn Williams: One for review in the Australian Book Review magazine by your former colleague, I suppose you probably still know him, Gareth Evans, the former Chancellor of the ANU here in Canberra as well as the Foreign Minister and so on, and he talks about ways in which you describe four ingredients that need to be looked after so we can solve the problems that we have obviously got at the moment. One of them of course is science, and there is an extraordinary article in the Sun Herald a few days ago that showed that science in this country is in a mess and we've got to do something about it. How do we make science great again?
Andrew Leigh: I think we need to just tell the stories, as you do, that's something that we all need to be better at, we all need to engage with our kids, talking about new scientific advances and about what science can bring, not just talk about climate change as though it's some big bogey but actually talk a little bit about the science of climate change and how it happens, and what we are learning, what the latest IPCC report tells us that the previous one didn't. Having those conversations has been important. Perhaps we should be listening to scientists right across the board.
Robyn Williams: But telling stories is in some ways talking about the past. The whole point about science is it's the future, and if you do it in politics, without insulting your calling, it's usually talking about next Tuesday, not the next five, ten years.
Andrew Leigh: Yes, having a long-term conversation has I think always been challenging, but in the current environment probably is even more challenging still. But the good news is we don't need to massively invest in things in order to reduce tangibly the probability of catastrophe. So the Biological Weapons Convention has a secretariat whose budget is a little smaller than the average McDonald's restaurant. We could do with increasing that tangibly.
And if you look at the oversight that we are currently doing on areas of artificial intelligence risk, there was an attempt by Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron to bring together something akin to the IPCC for artificial intelligence risk. That could be done at a modest cost, and I think would help ensure that we don't have a race to the bottom in terms of standards for ethical artificial intelligence. That's an interesting one there, Robyn, because the scientists basically agree that at some point between 20 and 100 years, we will reach the stage of machines whose performance is better than the typical human. And past that, the machines will accelerate very fast away from us and begin to view us in the same way in which we view our pets. So the question then is will their ethical values be aligned with ours.
Robyn Williams: Another ingredient that Gareth Evans isolated was our institutions. Need I mention universities, the ABC, who knows, we should foster them instead of, well, aiming at them.
Andrew Leigh: Absolutely, and you can see this particularly in the standing of universities under Donald Trump. So, before Trump, the Republicans and Democrats in the US had pretty similar views about universities. After Trump, Republicans had substantially soured on universities. That's dangerous because universities play such a critical role not only in educating the next generation but coming up with many of the solutions. So, forging a bipartisan consensus on universities really matters. I've been worried about what has happened here. We had a visiting higher education expert who said that the current government was the most anti-university government in the OECD, with the possible exception of Hungary. That is not a reputation we want.
Robyn Williams: Talking about universities and Trump, I see you quote Michael Lewis in your book and The Fifth Risk, and that really was very interesting, an amazing book. When it comes to two of the other ingredients, one of them is international cooperation and building the international goodwill.
Andrew Leigh: Yes, and perhaps one of the most dangerous things that happened during the Trump presidency was the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. At the moment we've got 11 nuclear powers in the world and there's a real risk that if we get another one, that that will add to the prospects of some sort of nuclear catastrophe, either intentionally or accidentally. As we know, the more people there are in a group, the more different permutations of conflict can arise.
So, reducing the number of nuclear weapons states is vital, as is reducing the number of nuclear weapons that every state has. Every nuclear weapon is a potential point of failure, and so we ought to be arguing for substantially smaller stockpiles, along with protocols such as no first use, and an ability to recall a rogue missile, which had been opposed by militaries in nuclear armed states but in my view are very sensible in an environment in which we don't want to start World War III by accident.
Robyn Williams: No, or on purpose even. Well, there are some of the ingredients, and when you go on your long runs and when you go home to your family and you look in the mirror, how do you actually feel about those odds, one in six? Do you think we'll make it?
Andrew Leigh: I hope we do, but these are terrifyingly high odds. That basically has humanity playing Russian roulette once a century, and we don't just owe it to our kids and grandkids but to think about those countless generations ahead who if they could see us now would be screaming at us like a kid playing with a handbrake of a car parked on top of a cliff; stop this madness, make sure that our generations can still endure.
Robyn Williams: Yes. But do you have hope?
Andrew Leigh: I do. Let me paint the positive picture. The well-being of humans has risen substantially. We enjoy much longer lives of greater meaning and health than our cave-dwelling ancestors, and that process can continue. And so our successors can live lives of meaning and beauty and depth that we could only dream about. And the exciting thing about dealing with catastrophic risk is that it enables that extraordinary flourishing of the human project. The idea that we might colonise the solar system is the very least of it, it's what we could do intellectually and morally as a species which makes it enormously exciting and so important that we reduce to near zero these catastrophic risks and allow this amazing human project, which has just gotten started, to flourish in the millennia to come.
Robyn Williams: The book by Andrew Leigh is What's the Worst That Could Happen? MIT Press.
-Australian Broadcasting Corporation