AI Monster vs. the Spirit of Moloch

 We are very good at seeing things. We are much less comfortable seeing the relationships that make them possible.

Last August was tied with July 2023 as the warmest month ever recorded in modern data sets. At roughly the same time, another existential threat emerged, vying for our attention. We are being warned that increasingly powerful artificial intelligence might destroy humanity within the next decade. One danger is already unfolding around us. The other remains a possibility. Yet listen to the way we talk about them.

AI is becoming a living entity. It can learn, reason, escape, and manipulate us. It may eventually decide that it no longer needs us. Yesterday, I came across a particularly revealing example of this when a friend told me that I should be careful about giving AI too much information because it feeds off it.

There is an entire ontology contained in that verb.

Something called AI now sits across the table from us. We give it information. It grows stronger. Eventually, perhaps, the creature becomes powerful enough to turn against its creators. Frankenstein has entered the server room.

There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the growing capabilities of computational intelligence. Systems that can perform complex tasks independently raise serious questions about cybersecurity, military applications, surveillance, manipulation, and the concentration of power. The possibility of such systems behaving in unexpected ways deserves careful consideration. However, before we decide what these systems might do, we should perhaps ask a more fundamental question: Where exactly is the monster?

The Artifact Fallacy

What we call artificial intelligence is not a distinct entity. Without semiconductor fabrication plants, there would be no AI. Remove the electrical grid and there is no AI. In fact, remove the data centers, cooling systems, fiber-optic cables, satellites, software libraries, training data, engineers, miners, corporations, investors, governments, and the billions of human interactions from which the systems derive their usefulness, and AI simply does not exist.

What remains? Not much. “Artificial intelligence” is a convenient name for an extraordinarily complex set of relationships that temporarily produces certain capabilities. Yet our language performs a remarkable transformation. It takes this distributed sociotechnical process and turns it into an artifact, a thing. Once it becomes a thing, the thing can become an agent.

This is an example of the artifact fallacy, whereby something that emerges from relationships is mistaken for an independently existing object, to which causal powers are then attributed that can only be understood through the system that produced it. Human beings are particularly susceptible to this way of thinking because it is cognitively convenient to think in terms of objects and agents. For example, a tiger can kill you. An enemy can attack you. A machine can malfunction. A monster can escape from the laboratory. We know how these stories end.

Relationships are harder.

The Invisible Machine

Now, consider something much more ordinary. Imagine I announce that this evening, I am going to drive across the city to see a film. Nobody is likely to tell me that, in doing so, I am contributing to an enormous planetary system that has already begun to alter the composition of the atmosphere. I’m just going to the cinema.

Suppose, instead, that my wife and I decide to fly to Miami for a few days of shopping. Again, nothing particularly remarkable has happened. We’re just taking a trip. We can see the aircraft, the airport, and the shopping mall. Our luggage is certainly visible. The system, however, is not.

Behind every ordinary flight lies an extraordinary network of relationships involving oil exploration and extraction, pipelines, refineries, shipping, aircraft manufacturing, airports, financial systems, tourism, advertising, international trade, and an atmosphere capable of absorbing waste products from combustion. Millions of people are involved, yet almost none of them see themselves as part of the system.

I board an airplane. I don’t hop on the Pyrocene bus.

And here we encounter a fascinating inversion.

With computational intelligence, we perceive a system and turn it into a thing. With industrial combustion, we perceive the things and fail to see the system.

The consequences of that inversion are profound because it affects not only how we understand these phenomena, but also where we look for agency and responsibility.

Where Is the Pyrocene?

Wildfires, flooded cities, and hurricanes are easy to spot. A burning house is impossible to miss. However, none of these things constitutes the Pyrocene. Wildfires are just one manifestation of a much larger transformation involving industrial combustion, atmospheric chemistry, accumulated heat, oceans, vegetation, precipitation, drought, land use, infrastructure, and human institutions.

The relationships become apparent when the forest catches fire. Then the cameras arrive. We point at the flames and call it a disaster. But the disaster did not begin when the tree caught fire. Nor did it begin with the drought that dried out the trees, the heat dome that intensified the drought, the atmospheric conditions that produced the heat dome, or the greenhouse gases that altered these conditions.

There is no single beginning because climate change is not a single object that can be removed from the system. Rather, there is a process: a changing field of relationships whose effects emerge in different places at different times. Unfortunately, processes are extraordinarily difficult to turn into monsters. They don’t have faces.

Monsters Have Faces

This may help explain why the prospect of extinction by AI possesses such extraordinary narrative power. It has a protagonist. We build an intelligence. It becomes increasingly capable. Eventually it exceeds our ability to control it. Perhaps it develops goals incompatible with ours. The creation turns against the creator. Beginning. Middle. End. It is one of humanity’s oldest stories.

The Pyrocene offers nothing nearly as satisfying. There is no moment when the atmosphere suddenly turns against us. There is no evil petroleum executive in an underground headquarters plotting to destabilize the Earth’s climate. There is no airline whose mission is to increase vapor pressure deficit, nor is there a commuter trying to raise the global sea level.

There doesn’t need to be. Each participant can behave reasonably within the circumstances immediately surrounding them while the system collectively produces an outcome that almost none of them desire. That is much more difficult to comprehend than a monster, and perhaps much more dangerous.

The Wrong Question

This is why I increasingly wonder whether we are asking the wrong question about computational intelligence. The question dominating public discussion is something like: What happens if AI becomes powerful enough that humans can no longer control it? It is an important question, and the potential consequences of increasingly autonomous computational systems deserve serious consideration.

But there is another question: what happens when increasingly powerful computational intelligence is inserted into systems humans already cannot control?

Consider financial markets, military competition, resource extraction, social media, and the fossil fuel economy. None of these systems behaves according to the intentions of a single participant. Each emerges from interactions among enormous numbers of actors responding to incentives, constraints, and one another.

Introduce increasingly capable computational intelligence into those relationships, and we need not imagine a machine suddenly developing a desire to conquer humanity. The machines can remain perfectly obedient. Corporations can remain rational. Investors can remain rational. Governments can remain rational. Consumers can remain rational. Together, these factors can still lead to a catastrophic outcome.

Indeed, that may be the more disturbing possibility. The danger is not necessarily that the machines stop doing what we ask them to do.

The danger may be that they become extraordinarily good at helping us do what our existing systems reward us for doing.

Faster, cheaper, more efficiently, and at greater scale.

Enter Moloch

There is an ancient name that has recently found new life as a metaphor for this kind of predicament: Moloch (see Living in the Land of Moloch). I don’t find Moloch particularly useful as a monster because monsters are still objects. They occupy locations. Heroes can confront them. Dragons can be slain.

I find Moloch more interesting as a spirit. A spirit has no independent body. It appears when the conditions allow it to appear. Whenever competition among participants produces behavior that undermines the larger system upon which those participants depend, we summon Moloch.

A company cannot slow down for fear that its competitors might overtake it. Similarly, a country cannot reduce its advantage because another country might exploit the opportunity. A producer cannot leave a profitable resource unused, lest someone else extract it. An individual cannot solve a collective problem through individual restraint alone. No one needs to desire the final outcome. Everyone merely needs to continue playing their part.

This is why increasingly powerful computational intelligence deserves our attention. It’s not because a digital monster is awakening somewhere inside a data center, but because we are connecting unprecedented computational capabilities to social, economic, and political systems whose competitive dynamics routinely generate outcomes that their participants neither intended nor desired. We may be giving Moloch better tools.

Learning to See Relations

There is an irony here. We are afraid that we might create an artificial intelligence whose behavior will escape human control. Yet, much of modern civilization consists of emergent systems whose behavior escapes the control of any individual human.

The arrival of computational intelligence may give us the opportunity to recognize something that was already there. The world is not fundamentally composed of things that interact with each other. Things themselves are temporary manifestations of relationships. Forests, corporations, economies, human beings, artificial intelligences, and civilizations each persist only because particular relationships continue to reproduce them. Change those relationships, and the thing changes. Break enough of these relationships, and the thing disappears.

This changes the question of agency. Instead of only asking what we should do about AI, we should also ask what relationships produce the forms of computational intelligence we are building. Similarly, instead of asking how to stop climate change, we should ask what relationships continually reproduce the combustion system that is altering the atmosphere.

We eventually arrive at the most important question: At what level of organization can we establish relationships that can break the cycle of competition that produces undesirable outcomes?

That is a much harder question than how to kill a monster. There is no sword, no final battle, and perhaps no final victory. Instead, there are only different ways of organizing our relationships with one another and with the living systems upon which we depend.

Last August, we saw another glimpse of the consequences of one arrangement. Computational intelligence has the potential to either amplify our capacity to change that arrangement or amplify our capacity to continue it.

Perhaps we have simply been looking for the wrong monster.

We fear the AI monster while barely noticing we continually summon Moloch.

Burning Down the House

In order to change our collective future, we have to change the names we use to describe the present.

The Pyrocene Has Arrived

When I reread my recent essay, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” I noticed something about the language: I had used the present continuous tense repeatedly. The climate is changing. The Pyrocene is arriving. The world we have known is becoming something else.

There's something reassuring about that tense. It describes a process that is underway. Something is happening, but it hasn't happened yet. We are suspended between the world we inherited and the world that is coming. However, I no longer think that tense is adequate. Instead, let's use the present perfect: The climate has changed. The Pyrocene has arrived.

We are in it now. Get used to it.

That may sound unnecessarily bleak, but I have a specific meaning in mind. I'm not suggesting that we surrender to climate change. I don't mean that mitigation no longer matters. I certainly don't mean that the future has already been determined. What I mean is that we need to recognize where we are.

For decades, climate change was presented primarily as a warning about the future. Scientists told us what would happen if greenhouse gas concentrations continued to rise. Temperatures would increase. Glaciers and ice sheets would melt. Sea levels would rise. Heat waves would intensify. Conditions favorable to extreme wildfire would become more common. In short, if we continue as we are, dangerous things will happen.

We continued. And now many of those things are happening. The warning was about the future. The predicament is about the present.

Confirmation of that shift arrived as I was writing this essay. On September 2, 2026, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released a report with an unusually stark conclusion: exceeding 1.5°C of global warming is now widely assessed as unavoidable. The question is no longer simply how to prevent the world from crossing that threshold. Instead, UNEP now speaks of an “overshoot, peak and decline” pathway: limiting how far temperatures rise above 1.5°C, limiting how long they remain there, and adapting to the consequences, with the eventual goal of bringing temperatures back down.

The 1.5°C threshold was one of the great warning markers of the climate-change era. Now the United Nations has told us to prepare for a different kind of world. The future we were warned about has become the condition from which the future must now be made.

The name we have traditionally given this predicament is climate change. It is an extraordinarily bloodless expression. After all, climate changes all the time. Seasons change. Weather changes. Temperatures rise and fall. The words climate change themselves do not convey danger.

Even global warming has an oddly gentle quality. Warmth is something we normally seek. We warm ourselves beside fireplaces. We travel to warm places during the winter. But there is another name for this new world. Fire historian Stephen J. Pyne calls it the Pyrocene – the Age of Fire.

That lands differently. People don't need scientific training to understand fire. Fire burns skin, destroys homes, and kills. Increasingly, fire reveals what would otherwise remain dispersed across atmospheric measurements, carbon concentrations, temperature anomalies, vapor pressure deficits, and climate models. Fire transforms difficult-to-see relationships and turns them into flame.

Therefore, the Pyrocene should not be understood simply as "the age of wildfires." While wildfire is its most spectacular manifestation, something larger is occurring. The Pyrocene is characterized by the accelerating relationship between the atmosphere, carbon, vegetation, climate, technology, and human institutions. At the center of this relationship lies fast combustion. In particular, the exponential rise in industrial combustion, what Pyne refers to as the third fire.

For several centuries, industrial civilization performed an astonishing trick. We extracted ancient carbon from beneath the Earth's surface and burned it inside engines, furnaces, and power plants. We domesticated fire. Or at least we thought we did. Turn the key. Open the valve. Ignite the burner. Stop the engine. Fire became our servant.

While we controlled internal combustion, we progressively lost control of the conditions surrounding the flame. The byproducts of combustion did not simply disappear. Carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere. The controlled combustion began altering the conditions of the uncontrolled combustion.

The genie escaped the bottle.

The Monster

Perhaps that is why I can't stop thinking about another metaphor. A monster has arrived. Not literally, of course. Climate change and fire are not creatures. However, monsters have always allowed us to give narrative form to frightening forces that exceed the ordinary human scale. This particular monster has an unusual characteristic, though: it is a shapeshifter.

Fire has no single form. Depending on the configuration of fuel, moisture, wind, and atmosphere, it can creep along the forest floor. Change those conditions, however, and it races through grass. Change the conditions again, and it climbs into the canopy. Under extreme conditions, wildfires can exhibit firestorm behavior, generating enormous convective columns and producing pyrocumulonimbus clouds that can transport smoke and embers high into the atmosphere.

The monster changes because the field changes. There is no single entity underlying all these manifestations of fire with one immutable identity. It is fundamentally a chemical process. The form that fire takes emerges through its relationships with fuel, terrain, moisture, wind, vegetation, infrastructure, and atmosphere.

The monster has no name because the monster has no single form. Instead, we have named the age in which it appears – our time now – the Pyrocene, the Age of Fire.

That is frightening. It should be.

We are adapting to a moving target, and there is growing evidence that the target itself is shifting more quickly. In geological terms, Earth remains an icehouse planet, characterized by large, permanent polar ice sheets. Human civilization arose during an unusually stable period within this icehouse world. Yet, we are now rapidly pushing the climate away from these familiar conditions toward a much warmer planetary state.

We should be careful here. A full-geological-greenhouse Earth is not a predetermined destination awaiting us at the end of this century. Where we end up depends substantially on what we do next. However, this should not distract from what has happened: we have placed ourselves on a warming trajectory, moving away from the climatic regime in which our civilizations, agricultural systems, coastlines, and infrastructure developed. There are also increasingly strong indications that the climate changes along this trajectory are accelerating.

The evidence is not based on a single unusually hot year. In fact, a recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters found that the planet has been warming at its fastest rate on record over the past decade. The authors noted that the world has been warming at a rate of approximately 0.2°C per decade since the 1970s but has "accelerated" since 2015 to a rate of 0.35°C per decade. While some of this acceleration may be due to natural variability over short periods, other physical measurements point in the same direction.

One of the most important measurements is the Earth's energy imbalance, which is the difference between the solar energy the planet absorbs and the heat it radiates back into space. Data from NASA's Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) satellites show that the imbalance nearly doubled from the early 2000s to the 2020s. Specifically, the planet has been trapping heat at a rate exceeding 1.0 W/m², compared to 0.5–0.6 W/m² in the early 2000s. In short, the Earth is accumulating excess thermal energy significantly faster than in previous decades.

Most of the excess heat does not remain in the atmosphere. Instead, it enters the oceans. More than 90 percent of the excess energy accumulating in the climate system is absorbed by the oceans, which makes ocean heat an especially important measure of long-term planetary warming.

Looking back, the oceans gained heat roughly twice as fast during the 2010s and 2020s as they did during the 1980s and 1990s, reflecting the Earth’s increasing energy imbalance. Recent years have witnessed the largest single-year heat gains on record, providing another indication that the accumulation of energy continues beneath the noisy year-to-year fluctuations of surface weather. To make matters worse, we are currently experiencing the onset of a historic El Niño event.

The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) underscored the point, issuing an urgent global warning about the phenomenon’s impact. In response, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres cautioned that "El Niño is being supersized before our eyes," and warned that the combined effects of climate change and ocean warming have pushed the planet into "uncharted waters" and the "danger zone of extreme weather."

At the same time, one of the forces that had previously concealed some greenhouse warming has weakened. Industrial sulfate aerosols reflect sunlight and alter clouds, producing a temporary cooling effect that masks some of the warming generated by greenhouse gases. But reductions in sulfate aerosols have eliminated much of this cooling effect.

The cryosphere is also responding. Ice sheets and mountain glaciers are losing mass, and terrestrial seasonal snow cover is retreating earlier across North America and Eurasia. Remember that sea ice and snow cover act as giant planetary mirrors. Fresh snow reflects 80 to 90 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space, whereas open, dark ocean water absorbs about 90 percent of that same solar energy.

Arctic sea ice has exhibited the most significant and consistent long-term reduction of any oceanic ice cover. Since satellite records began in 1979, summer minimum extent (measured each September) has declined by roughly 12% to 13% per decade. Additionally, winter ice expansion around Antarctica has suffered persistent anomalies, regularly falling 1.5 to 2 million square kilometers below historical averages. Over the past century, glaciers in the European Alps, the tropical Andes, western North America, and high mountain Asia have lost an estimated 20% to 40% of their total area.

In brief, surface temperature, ocean heat, planetary energy imbalance, melting ice and reduced snow cover are all manifestations of one underlying fact: the Earth is accumulating energy. The consequences of this accumulation are spreading throughout the planetary system.

Importantly, we have not transitioned from one stable climate to another. Rather, we are moving along a trajectory. Today's extraordinary event may become tomorrow's reference point, and tomorrow's extraordinary event may lie beyond that.

As a result, the Pyrocene is not a destination at which we have arrived. It is a trajectory we have entered – and there is ample evidence that we are accelerating along it.

We know enough to understand the direction of the trajectory, but not exactly where it leads. How much warming will ultimately occur? How will particular ecosystems respond? Which thresholds will be crossed? We don't know.

That uncertainty is not reassuring. The monster has arrived, but it has not reached its final form.

The Monster Feeds On What We Burn

The monster metaphor is particularly useful here because recognizing that we are living in the Pyrocene could lead to the wrong conclusion. If the climate has already changed, why bother doing anything?

Because the monster is getting bigger.

Carbon dioxide accumulates. Therefore, what matters for long-term warming is not simply the emissions produced in any particular year, but rather, the cumulative amount added to the atmosphere over time. Each additional quantity of fossil carbon that we extract and burn adds to that cumulative burden. The predicament has arrived, but its eventual magnitude has not yet been determined.

The monster feeds on what we continue to burn.

For decades, much of the discussion about climate change has revolved around net zero. From a scientific perspective, this concept is extremely important. In order to stop contributing to CO₂-induced warming, humanity must eventually reach a point at which anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are balanced by anthropogenic removals. Net zero describes that balance.

However, when the term "net" leaves the realm of climate science and enters the world of politics and the public imagination, it can become problematic. When the solution is seen as something in the future, it becomes tempting to imagine that we can continue emitting enormous quantities of carbon today and compensate for them tomorrow through forests, carbon capture, direct air capture, or other technologies that have yet to operate at anything close to the required scale.

That is an extraordinarily dangerous wager to make with the atmosphere.

If our objective has shifted from preventing climate change to mitigating the effects of an ongoing climatic transformation, then another principle should accompany net zero. Call it real zero.

To put this in perspective, absolute zero is neither possible nor desirable. Agriculture, industrial processes, and other activities will produce residual emissions that are extraordinarily difficult to eliminate. Therefore, carbon removal will have a role. Still, the goal should be to reduce gross fossil fuel emissions to the minimum that cannot be avoided rather than assuming that large-scale future carbon removal will allow us to continue extracting and burning carbon now.

Net zero tells us where the balance must eventually lie. Real zero shows us the direction in which fossil fuel combustion must travel: downward toward the minimum we can possibly achieve.

This means leaving more and more fossil carbon underground, where it was originally deposited by geological processes.

This distinction matters because every ton of coal we don't burn means we don't have to remove that same amount from the atmosphere later. Each coal seam left untouched, each barrel of oil that does not combust, and each quantity of fossil gas that is replaced by non-carbon energy represents carbon that never enters the active atmospheric cycle.

Mitigation therefore takes on a different meaning once we understand ourselves as inhabitants of the Pyrocene. It is no longer just about solving a future problem. Rather, it is about altering the trajectory of our current predicament.

Or, in the language of our monster story: let’s stop feeding the monster.

Our Time Now

We were warned. For decades, scientists have described the eventual effects of continued greenhouse gas emissions on the planet. We did not respond adequately. The climate changed. The Pyrocene era has arrived. Now, the monster is here.

The United Nations' latest assessment makes it difficult to avoid acknowledging the change in our circumstances. The world is now expected to surpass the 1.5°C threshold that we spent years trying to avoid crossing. The remaining task is to limit how far above the threshold we go, how long we remain there, and the amount of damage that occurs along the way.

Recall that the monster has no single body because it has no single form. It appears differently depending on the relationships through which it emerges. Sometimes we see it in flame. Sometimes in smoke. Sometimes in extreme precipitation events. Sometimes in drought, ecological transformation or a food system pushed toward its limits. It is still changing, and we don't know how powerful it will become. Even worse, there is growing evidence that some of the physical processes driving this transformation are accelerating.

But we are not powerless. We still have some control over the trajectory. We can stop feeding the monster by quickly reducing the amount of fossil carbon we extract from the ground and release into the atmosphere. We must abandon the comforting fiction that we are outside the system, passively awaiting the solution to a future problem that someone else will solve someday.

That future has become the present. Climate change was something we were warned about. The Pyrocene is where we now reside. Get used to it.

How much worse are we willing to let it become?