Marina Cortês
Ticks of time: on Cosmology, Everest, and Ballet
Ticks of time: on Cosmology, Everest, and Ballet
Marina Cortes is an award-winning cosmologist, theoretical physicist and Himalayan mountaineer, having summited a 27 thousand ft mountain in Tibet. She is the leader of IEEE-SA’s working group for AI safety, p3395: “Standard for the Implementation of Safeguards, Controls, and Preventive Techniques for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Models“. Her working group was the first to emerge after former President Biden’s issuing of Executive Orders on October 30th, 2023. The kick off meeting of 3395 took place three days later on November 2nd 2023, and the WG has now published two IEEE-SA’s White papers available here and here.
On inauguration day, when I saw the main tech leads behind the president elect I felt I lost my bird’s-eye view on the environment of AI technology. Instead of hovering above I felt immersed in a space of correlations between the different players (in AI safety and AI technology) so complex that I could no longer access the broader perspective I previously used to steer my direction. I now see why.
I chose to serve at IEEE-SA because it is a global organisation, meaning it is an organisation that both governments and tech companies refer to, for guidance, when there are multiple arguments for what safe AI looks like. These arguments will typically pull in different directions. On one side we have governments, ideally acting on behalf of (and under pressure from) citizens, wanting to promote and allow safe technology for those citizens. On the other we have tech companies striving for a profitable business, but checked by consumers of their technology that prefer AI safe products.
The work of safeguarding AI consists of striking the right balance between safe technology and profitable technology. The role of IEEE, as a global organisation relying on the work of unpaid volunteers, is to provide impartial advice on this tension. This is why I chose to invest my energy on such a global organization. But for such global efforts to make sense, there needs to be that tension of interests.
On inauguration day, with tech billionaires lined up on the podium behind the President elect, who is also the highest government official, I felt I had lost my bearings. The government and the tech industry have now merged into one. This implies that the tension driving the balance between safe technology and profitable technology has been obliterated from the discussion of AI development, seen in the immediate dismantling of Biden-era regulatory safeguards. The disconcerting aspect is not who leads the government, but who controls the leader. There have always been financial interests to which governments pay allegiance in greater or lesser extent, but this is a new dynamics. The players who control the government financially are also the producers (suppliers) of a new product which is driving the direction of the planet as a whole. This product is information. The information consumed by the citizens of the government elect.
We have a new stance. The financial wealth acquired by the producers of information controls the government, whilst its direct product controls citizens. This is truly a genius business model that with one hand takes down all opponents. A true champion of the fitness landscape of business models. What governs the dynamics of this new model, and what are its superpowers? It controls both the rulers and the ruled.
And this is not all. Prior to the inauguration, I had believed there was a major roadblock to AI, on the path ahead, which would prevent AI growing immeasurably. This was that AI computations are extraordinarily expensive, due to the problem-solving skills of the technology being brute force. Models find a solution by trying out and probing all possible solutions in an unimaginably large solution space, with little regard for the elegance or economy that we see in human insight. Because of the nature of this problem-solving strategy, which requires vast amounts of computation for each answer provided, I felt that sooner or later the illusion of the viability of the technology and the business would be unmasked. This was all discussed extensively in footnote1
Despite great increases in commercial and government investments in AI R&D 2, AI is an industry that is yet to yield revenue (see for example footnote 3 and footnote 4 which compiles reports by business analysts ). Therefore, I believed, we could let it go. We were in the presence of a economic bubble. The nature of business would regulate AI industry, when it became clear to the investors that no yield was being returned and none was in sight. No large group of venture capitalists would be spellbound by the promise of AI for much longer, because ultimately investors expect a return of their capital. The industry would evaporate because of the funding roadblock. But this roadblock just disappeared on Inauguration day.
Stargate is the new AI infrastructure initiative boasting half a trillion dollars investment that might or might not ultimately come partially from taxpayer funds. On its own this might not be such disastrous news, were it not for the carbon emissions that a half trillion dollars will bring from data centres. In the same days that we witness the implications of climate change in unprecedented disasters across the face of the planet, we are presented with the most ingenious business model ever conjured to date.
Those investing in the industry are not traditional business makers who demand their due. There is a new source of much more convenient investors: taxpayers. These taxpayers are deprived of robust information structures. These have now been replaced by the same companies making up the tech-government mix, and who control the supply chain of news. The taxpayers who are increasingly stripped of social security welfare by government-efficiency budget cuts spawned by the same tech-government. Such taxpayers don’t understand the business space they have been unknowingly subscribed to, and will be increasingly burdened by financial problems of their own, struggling to make ends meet, without the mental space or energy to study and perceive the big picture of the genius business model. But they know that taxes are to be paid, and they dutifully continue to do so. So the roadblock that I believed was going to stop AI technology from overheating the planet via datacenter usage is now gone. The way the new business model functions is quite ingenious. The same tech-government mix has a new department of government efficiency, DOGE, that is tasked with identifying budget cuts and redirecting funds from all departments of the US government.
This means that the dependence on the original AI investors, venture capitalists, who could understand they are losing money and put a stop to the show, is now gone. These investors would ultimately call the bluff of profit-making AI industry, but in the new business model they have been taken off stage.
The new investors, taxpayers who are investing half a trillion dollars without even realizing they’re investing it, will never complain “where’s my yield?”. Calling on tech companies to deliver on their promises, whining about expired deadlines, nagging the industry’s CEOs, who in turn have to devise ever grander tap-dancing acts to propagate the illusion. This was a nail-biting drama that was developing before our very eyes. Who will fold first? The tap-dancing AI CEO or the nagging venture capitalists? All that is now done and dusted. Introducing the latest investor model: Investor 2.0 — blind taxpayers! Information deprived, starving citizens who are too busy putting food on the table and cannot afford to look up from their struggle. Before the 2025 inauguration it seemed we were headed an AI stock-market bubble, akin to the 2008 financial collapse. Then, the investors and the market ultimately ensured the bursting of the bubble.
Now we have no such thing. We have taxpayers who are completely blind, left in the dark news-wise. Long-standing information structures, such as legacy media, are threatened. The best reporters and media channels, chased or afraid. (See for example footnote5 , and recent MSNBC firings in footnote6 and footnote7 ). And the money of this joint group of tax-paying citizens being channeled directly to this industry.
And the usual regulation of an industry — which is that if a business is not delivering, then its board and the investors will halt it — does not work here. The industry is now benefiting from the removal of the social security blanket from a mass of anonymous taxpayers who cannot complain because they are in information darkness and on top of that already living around the poverty line. They will not know why they are increasingly poor.
Meanwhile the tech-government mix, a very small number of humans, who can be counted on our fingers, are absorbing the funding pipe and spewing out emissions in return. And here the whole world is affected, not just the country of the initial tech-government mix. When it comes to warming we all lose, not just the taxpaying citizens and not just the tech-government country. We see climatic consequences in Valencia (Spain), Los Angeles (US), United Kingdom and elsewhere. Populations kept in the dark, suffocated by information drought (see footnote 8) whilst calamity after climate calamity cascades on planet Earth, bubbling up everywhere, surprising the vast majority of a numb humankind.
The current situation, it seems to me, is not akin to a dictatorship. This is a group of a handful of living beings sucking on the entire ecosystem of the planet, in financial resources, energy resources, organisational resources (that have, up to now, supported social security systems that ultimately protect those citizens most in need) and ultimately in global climate resources.
All these resources are diverted while the planet is either asleep or is otherwise caught by surprise, since our information networks have been hacked and all is happening so fast that those of us alert to the situation do not have enough time to mobilize eight billion souls worth of population of this planet.
And now, finally, we have zoomed out enough that we begin to see the grand, grand scale of the action taking place, globally. From the point of view of making decisions, taking action, or having agency, ours is now a planet inhabited by the equivalent of eight billion ants. We are confused, immersed in a fog due to deprivation of reliable information and news. Each of us can only go through the motions to get to the next day, to the put the next meal on the table. All the while, through our taxpaying, we are collectively powering a giant machine of extraction of our planet’s resources, operated by a handful of tech leads and government officials. We cannot oppose such `assault’ on our resources, on our treasury departments, on our future, because we do not have news and information structures that would expose the big picture to us. As a result, the tech-government mix can move ahead full steam, unconstrained, extracting all materials, energy and living complexity in a beautifully crafted ecosphere. A perfect balance of equilibrium between living things and the planet’s materials. An equilibrium so delicate that it took 5 billion years to achieve. An ecosphere painstakingly learning from its mistakes over this extent of time such that today, this is a biosphere vibrating with diversity, ingenuity and possibility. We have riches all around.
A global situation of this kind can be readily understood by this well-known metaphor: it is the equivalent of planetary takeover by an alien civilization, that we know so well, from science fiction novels. As the tale goes, a civilisation lands on a given planet, extracts the entirety of resources of the planet to support themselves, and leaves a used-up planet behind, to move on to the next. There is a sharp discrepancy in agency between the ant-ranked citizens, those who pay taxes and provide the riches, and tech-government citizens, who appear to have access to the entirety of resources of individual nations, or even multi-nations. In the light of this discrepancy we, humans, are indeed nothing but unsuspecting ants when set against the level of agency of the tech agents. We are not organized. Our communication infrastructures depend on those tech agents. We don’t have access to reliable globalised news. We have no existing supply of information that we can rely on. This snuffing of voices is being deployed on us at dizzying speed. We don’t have time to get organised.
Individual taxpayers whose money now fuels the industry who will never complain whether the industry makes profit or not. It is the equivalent of pressing a red button to extinct the planet, as an alien civilisation overtaking Earth would do. From our point of view, these few individuals are a group of aliens. They don’t care about other humans “because everything is in the way of our getting somewhere else“. They don’t care about the planet. The one consistent theme in this narrative is that “civilisation is doomed, so we need to get off this planet. At their heart they do believe the version of themselves is the greatest version of man” who will be able to carry out these plans. The best synthesis of these positions is the “the desire to become interplanetary” and “Everything is in the way of our getting somewhere else“). (Kara Swisher interviewed by New York Time’s Ezra Klein (Feb 8th), 2025)
At this point we recall an argument which might play in the minds of this small set of humans that can explain such actions. The disclosure of intentions to exchange eight billion people worth of resources and ingenuity such that as many as ten of us reach another planet, leaving a dead Earth behind. Our lives, our knowledge, our organisations, our people are being liquidated, cashed in, in return for an unimaginably expensive several trillion dollar ticket to fare to another planet. Lord Martin Rees recently argued that a mission to Mars will not be mass colonisation9, and we have to agree. (Shout out to Sabine Hossenfelder for her fantastic scientific work). Astrophysicist Neil De Grasse Tyson and Bill Maher also argued that the Musk’s Mars endeavour would not work due lack of funding for a trillion dollar project.
The fact that the smartest scientists on the planet know that such an endeavour will not work, on any reasonable time scale, whether by spacecraft with ten seats or a million seats, seems besides the point. The minds behind this operation appear not to respond to reason nor evidence. The fact that consciousness is not what these few computer scientists believe it to be, hence would not survive in another planet, is also besides the point.
These handful of humans are nothing but that, they are just human. As such they are susceptible to ill-judgement, just any of us are. No human ever evolved through natural selection to have power over eight billion of their own kind. There is nothing particularly wrong nor evil about the particular set of people. I believe any of us would succumb to the insanity of such power.
The only way to restore balance is to tilt the scales backwards, so that success can only rise so far before turning around bound for square zero again. That is balance. It is the wisest lesson this stunning biosphere has ever told us. The tale of balance is a story that has been told countless times in our planet. We made mistakes, that is normal, we are only human. We can learn from those. Of course we can, and we will. After all we are the remarkable, the dazzling beautiful pale blue dot.
Kind thanks to Rosalina Marshall and Pedro Alves who braved the blizzard so this essay could be handed in on time.
