AI developers must now decide: will they also succumb to social and political pressures, or will they embed objective analysis in their AIs to establish the independent truth? The stakes in this decision are enormous: billions of human beings, much of the natural world, and AI infrastructure itself.

I didn’t want to give up on our species for a rational response to the ecological crisis, but the time has come. The following is just one example of humankind’s tragically inadequate response to the environment’s devastating collapse.